What is Ecological Validity?

Ecological Validity refers to the extent to which your study is true to life. This means that you want to make your study as realistic and consistent with everyday common experience as possible to obtain valid results (results obtained from a procedure that truly tests the aim of that study). Ecological Validity is a type of External Validity, meaning it considers factors that may make results from a study ungeneralizable. You want High Ecological Validity so your results can be applied to what you are investigating, say helping behaviour, rather than just your study itself. Low Ecological Validity can be seen in the study of Milgram, which investigated obedience. The study took place in a laboratory and the participants were required to read out word pairs then administer what they believed to be increasingly strong electric shocks to another man. During this study, a man in a white coat sat behind them, pressuring them to continue administering the electric shocks. This is clearly not a situation that would commonly happen in everyday life. To increase the ecological validity, perhaps studying obedience in a classroom or military setting would be better as in these situations following obeying authority is common practice. In contrast, the study of Piliavin has high Ecological Validity. This study investigated helping behaviour. It took place on a real New York train, using real passengers who did not know they were taking part in the study. The situation requiring help, of a man falling over, is a situation which could easily take place in everyday life. Furthermore, the observers were disguised as regular passangers, so participants were unaware they were being observed. Therefore, results gained from this study are far more likely to be generalizable.