Abstract
While the term “reactivity” has come to be associated with specific phenomena in the social sciences, having to do with subjects’ awareness of being studied, this paper takes a broader stance on this concept. I argue that reactivity is a ubiquitous feature of the psychological subject matter and that this fact is a precondition of experimental research, while also posing potential problems for the experimenter. The latter are connected to the worry about distorted data and experimental artifacts. But what are experimental artifacts and what is the most productive way of dealing with them? In this paper, I approach these questions by exploring the ways in which experimenters in psychology simultaneously exploit and suppress the reactivity of their subject matter in order to produce experimental data that speak to the question or subject matter at hand. Highlighting the artificiality of experimental data, I raise (and answer) the question of what distinguishes a genuine experimental result from an experimental artifact. My analysis construes experimental results as the outcomes of inferences from the data that take material background assumptions as auxiliary premises. Artifacts occur when one or more of these background assumptions are false, such that the data do not reliably serve the purposes they were generated for. I conclude by laying out the ways in which my analysis of data quality is relevant to, and informed by, recent debates about the replicability of experimental results.
Highlights
It is a fundamental feature of human beings and other animals that we react – sometimes unwittingly and sometimes on purpose - to our physical and social environments
Methodological writings in the social sciences have long recognized a class of reactions peculiar to human beings, i.e., reactions that have to do with our knowledge of being part of a scientific investigation
An experimental design aims to lay down the physical conditions that need to be in place, such that researchers are warranted in treating the data that result from the implementation of such a design as licensing an inference to a specific experimental result
Summary
It is a fundamental feature of human beings and other animals that we react – sometimes unwittingly and sometimes on purpose - to our physical and social environments. While it is surely the case that the awareness of being studied can give rise to specific kinds of pernicious reactivity, this is not the only kind of reactivity that plays a role in experiments It is only by virtue of our disposition to react to stimuli and to experimental instructions that we can generate behavioral data at all. I will (in Section 3) argue that this artificiality should not surprise us, given the well-known fact that scientific data are highly local and often don’t bear any obvious resemblance to the phenomena under investigation (Bogen & Woodward, 1988) This will give rise to the question what considerations go into data production in the course of specific experiments. I will argue that this situation is likely to occur in cases
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