experimental research articles pdf

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts

Research articles

O-GlcNAcylation levels remain stable regardless of the anaesthesia in healthy rats

• Thomas Dupas
• Amandine Vergnaud
• Benjamin Lauzier

Experimental study of organic enrichment on meiofaunal diversity

• Deyaaedin A. Mohammad
• Ammar AL-Farga
• Mahmoud Sami

Optimization of ultrasonic pretreatment and analysis of chlorogenic acid in potato leaves

• Xianyun Gong

Reducing childhood mortality extends mothers’ lives

• Matthew N. Zipple

Novel betaherpesviruses and gammaherpesviruses in bats from central China

• Shuhui Duan

Prevalence and factors associated with diabetes-related distress in type 2 diabetes patients: a study in Hong Kong primary care setting

• Man Ho Wong
• Sin Man Kwan

Computational study of diffraction image formation from XFEL irradiated single ribosome molecule

• Michal Stransky
• Adrian P. Mancuso

Mechanically-flexible wafer-scale integrated-photonics fabrication platform

• Milica Notaros
• Thomas Dyer
• Jelena Notaros

Evaluation of the feeding safety of Moringa ( Moringa oleifera L.) in the Sprague Dawley rat

• Yu-Wen Zhang
• Fu-Jun Wang
• Bi-Zhi Huang

Quantitative analysis of hemodynamic changes induced by the discrepancy between the sizes of the flow diverter and parent artery

• Sunghan Kim
• Hyeondong Yang
• Yong Bae Kim

Comparison of anthracycline-containing and anthracycline-free regimens in neoadjuvant HER-2 positive breast cancer treatment

• Murat Bardakci
• Hilal Karakas
• Bulent Yalcin

Pulmonary arteries in coelacanths shed light on the vasculature evolution of air-breathing organs in vertebrates

• Camila Cupello
• Gaël Clément
• Paulo M. Brito

Heavy metals immobilization and bioavailability in multi-metal contaminated soil under ryegrass cultivation as affected by ZnO and MnO 2 nanoparticle-modified biochar

• Mahboobeh Varnaseri Ghandali
• Sedigheh Safarzadeh
• Sedigheh Zeinali

Anti-fatigue activity of methyl dihydrojasmonate and linalool in a rat model evaluated by a novel index for neuro-immune and oxidative stress interactions

• Yasumitsu Nishimura
• Kenta Nomiyama
• Akira Yamauchi

A nomogram to predict mortality in patients with severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome

• Xuezhen Song
• Jinshuang Bo

Differential expression analysis identifies a prognostically significant extracellular matrix–enriched gene signature in hyaluronan-positive clear cell renal cell carcinoma

• Otto Jokelainen
• Teemu J. Rintala
• Timo K. Nykopp

Generating an organ-deficient animal model using a multi-targeted CRISPR-Cas9 system

• Jonathan Jun-Yong Lim
• Yamato Murata
• Ayako Isotani

Effect of biological shells aggregate on the mechanical properties and sustainability of concrete

• Xianpeng Wang
• Wenbing Fan

Multi-scene application of intelligent inspection robot based on computer vision in power plant

• Jianxian Guo
• Lincheng Liu

CASi: A framework for cross-timepoint analysis of single-cell RNA sequencing data

• Yizhuo Wang
• Christopher R. Flowers

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

The practice of experimental psychology: an inevitably postmodern endeavor.

• Department of Psychology, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

The aim of psychology is to understand the human mind and behavior. In contemporary psychology, the method of choice to accomplish this incredibly complex endeavor is the experiment. This dominance has shaped the whole discipline from the self-concept as an empirical science and its very epistemological and theoretical foundations, via research practice and the scientific discourse to teaching. Experimental psychology is grounded in the scientific method and positivism, and these principles, which are characteristic for modern thinking, are still upheld. Despite this apparently stalwart adherence to modern principles, experimental psychology exhibits a number of aspects which can best be described as facets of postmodern thinking although they are hardly acknowledged as such. Many psychologists take pride in being “real natural scientists” because they conduct experiments, but it is particularly difficult for psychologists to evade certain elements of postmodern thinking in view of the specific nature of their subject matter. Postmodernism as a philosophy emerged in the 20th century as a response to the perceived inadequacy of the modern approach and as a means to understand the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the times. Therefore, postmodernism offers both valuable insights into the very nature of experimental psychology and fruitful ideas on improving experimental practice to better reflect the complexities and ambiguities of human mind and behavior. Analyzing experimental psychology along postmodern lines begins by discussing the implications of transferring the scientific method from fields with rather narrowly defined phenomena—the natural sciences—to a much broader and more heterogeneous class of complex phenomena, namely the human mind and behavior. This ostensibly modern experimental approach is, however, per se riddled with postmodern elements: (re-)creating phenomena in an experimental setting, including the hermeneutic processes of generating hypotheses and interpreting results, is no carbon copy of “reality” but rather an active construction which reflects irrevocably the pre-existing ideas of the investigator. These aspects, analyzed by using postmodern concepts like hyperreality and simulacra, did not seep in gradually but have been present since the very inception of experimental psychology, and they are necessarily inherent in its philosophy of science. We illustrate this theoretical analysis with the help of two examples, namely experiments on free will and visual working memory. The postmodern perspective reveals some pitfalls in the practice of experimental psychology. Furthermore, we suggest that accepting the inherently fuzzy nature of theoretical constructs in psychology and thinking more along postmodern lines would actually clarify many theoretical problems in experimental psychology.

Introduction

Postmodernism is, in essence, an attempt to achieve greater clarity in our perception, thinking, and behavior by scrutinizing their larger contexts and preconditions, based on the inextricably intertwined levels of both the individual and the society. Psychology also studies the human mind and behavior, which indicates that psychology should dovetail with postmodern approaches. In the 1990s and early 2000s, several attempts were made to introduce postmodern thought as potentially very fruitful ideas into general academic psychology ( Jager, 1991 ; Kvale, 1992 ; Holzman and Morss, 2000 ; Holzman, 2006 ). However, overall they were met with little response.

Postmodern thoughts have been taken up by several fringe areas of academic psychology, e.g., psychoanalysis ( Leffert, 2007 ; Jiménez, 2015 ; but see Holt, 2005 ), some forms of therapy and counseling ( Ramey and Grubb, 2009 ; Hansen, 2015 ), humanistic ( Krippner, 2001 ), feminist and gender ( Hare-Mustin and Marecek, 1988 ; Sinacore and Enns, 2005 ), or cultural psychology ( Gemignani and Peña, 2007 ).

However, there is resistance against suggestions to incorporate postmodern ideas into the methodology and the self-perception of psychology as academic—and scientific!—discipline. In fact, postmodern approaches are often rejected vehemently, sometimes even very vocally. For instance, Gergen (2001) argued that the “core tenets” of postmodernism are not at odds with those of scientific psychology but rather that they can enrich the discipline by opening up new possibilities. His suggestions were met with reservation and were even outright rejected on the following grounds: postmodernism, “like anthrax of the intellect, if allowed [our italics] into mainstream psychology, […] will poison the field” ( Locke, 2002 , 458), that it “wishes to return psychology to a prescientific subset of philosophy” ( Kruger, 2002 , 456), and that psychology “needs fewer theoretical and philosophical orientations, not more” ( Hofmann, 2002 , 462; see also Gergen ’s, 2001 , replies to the less biased and more informed commentaries on his article).

In the following years, and continuing the so-called science wars of the 1990s ( Segerstråle, 2000 ), several other attacks were launched against a perceived rise or even dominance of postmodern thought in psychology. Held(2007 ; see also the rebuttal by Martin and Sugarman, 2009 ) argued that anything postmodern would undermine rationality and destroy academic psychology. Similarly, postmodernism was identified—together with “radical environmentalism” and “pseudoscience” among other things—as a “key threat to scientific psychology” ( Lilienfeld, 2010 , 282), or as “inimical to progress in the psychology of science” ( Capaldi and Proctor, 2013 , 331). The following advice was given to psychologists: “We [psychologists] should also push back against the pernicious creep of these untested concepts into our field” ( Tarescavage, 2020 , 4). Furthermore, the term “postmodern” is even employed as an all-purpose invective in a popular scientific book by psychologist Steven Pinker (2018) .

Therefore, it seems that science and experimental psychology on the one hand and postmodern thinking on the other are irreconcilable opposites. However, following Gergen (2001) and Holtz (2020) , we argue that this dichotomy is only superficial because postmodernism is often misunderstood. A closer look reveals that experimental psychology contains many postmodern elements. Even more, there is reason to assume that a postmodern perspective may be beneficial for academic psychology: First, the practice of experimental psychology would be improved by integrating postmodern thinking because it reveals a side of the human psyche for which experimental psychology is mostly blind. Second, the postmodern perspective can tell us much about the epistemological and social background of experimental psychology and how this affects our understanding of the human psyche.

A Postmodern Perspective on Experimental Psychology

Experimental psychology and the modern scientific worldview.

It lies within the nature of humans to try to find out more about themselves and their world, but the so-called Scientific Revolution of the early modern period marks the beginning of a new era in this search for knowledge. The Scientific Revolution, which has led to impressive achievements in the natural sciences and the explanation of the physical world (e.g., Olby et al., 1991 ; Henry, 1997 ; Cohen, 2015 ; Osterlind, 2019 ), is based on the following principle: to “measure what can be measured and make measurable what cannot be measured.” This famous appeal—falsely attributed to Galileo Galilei but actually from the 19th century ( Kleinert, 2009 )—illustrates the two fundamental principles of modern science: First, the concept of “measurement” encompasses the idea that phenomena can be quantified, i.e., expressed numerically. Second, the concept of “causal connections” pertains to the idea that consistent, non-random relationships can be established between measurable phenomena. Quantification allows that relationships between phenomena can be expressed, calculated, and predicted in precise mathematical and numerical terms.

However, there are two important issues to be aware of. First, while it is not difficult to measure “evident” aspects, such as mass and distance, more complex phenomena cannot be measured easily. In such cases, it is therefore necessary to find ways of making these “elusive” phenomena measurable. This can often only be achieved by reducing complex phenomena to their simpler—and measurable!—elements. For instance, in order to measure memory ability precisely, possible effects of individual preexisting knowledge which introduce random variance and thus impreciseness have to be eliminated. Indeed, due to this reason, in many memory experiments, meaningless syllables are used as study material.

Second, it is not difficult to scientifically prove a causal relationship between a factor and an outcome if the relationship is simple, that is, if there is only one single factor directly influencing the outcome. In such a case, showing that a manipulation of the factor causes a change in the outcome is clear evidence for a causal relationship because there are no other factors which may influence the outcome as well. However, in situations where many factors influence an outcome in a complex, interactive way, proving a causal relationship is much more difficult. To prove the causal effect of one factor in such a situation the effects of all other factors—called confounding factors from the perspective of the factor of interest—have to be eliminated so that a change in the outcome can be truly attributed to a causal effect of the factor of interest. However, this has an important implication: The investigator has to divide the factors present in a given situation into interesting versus non-interesting factors with respect to the current context of the experiment. Consequently, while experiments reveal something about local causal relationships, they do not necessarily provide hints about the net effect of all causal factors present in the given situation.

The adoption of the principles of modern science has also changed psychology. Although the beginnings of psychology—as the study of the psyche —date back to antiquity, psychology as an academic discipline was established in the mid to late 19th century. This enterprise was also inspired by the success of the natural sciences, and psychology was explicitly modeled after this example by Wilhelm Wundt—the “father of experimental psychology”—although he emphasized the close ties to the humanities as well. The experiment quickly became the method of choice. There were other, more hermeneutic approaches during this formative phase of modern psychology, such as psychoanalysis or introspection according to the Würzburg School, but their impact on academic psychology was limited. Behaviorism emerged as a direct reaction against these perceived unscientific approaches, and its proponents emphasized the scientific character of their “new philosophy of psychology.” It is crucial to note that in doing so they also emphasized the importance of the experiment and the necessity of quantifying directly observable behavior in psychological research. Behaviorism quickly became a very influential paradigm which shaped academic psychology. Gestalt psychologists, whose worldview is radically different from behaviorism, also relied on experiments in their research. Cognitive psychology, which followed, complemented, and partly superseded behaviorism, relies heavily on the experiment as a means to gain insight into mental processes, although other methods such as modeling are employed as well. Interestingly, there is a fundamental difference between psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology, which do not rely on the experiment, and the other above-mentioned approaches as the former focus on the psychic functioning of individuals, whereas the latter focus more on global laws of psychic functioning across individuals. This is reflected in the fact that psychological laws in experimental psychology are established on the arithmetic means across examined participants—a difference we will elaborate on later in more detail. Today, psychology is the scientific —in the sense of empirical-quantitative—study of the human mind and behavior, and the experiment is often considered the gold standard in psychological research (e.g., Mandler, 2007 ; Goodwin, 2015 ; Leahey, 2017 ).

The experiment is closely associated with the so-called scientific method ( Haig, 2014 ; Nola and Sankey, 2014 ) and the epistemological tenets philosophy of positivism—in the sense as Martin (2003) ; Michell (2003) , and Teo (2018) explain—which sometimes exhibit characteristics of naïve empiricism. Roughly speaking, the former consists of observing, formulating hypotheses, and testing these hypotheses in experiments. The latter postulates that knowledge is based on sensory experience, that it is testable, independent of the investigator and therefore objective as it accurately depicts the world as it is. This means that in principle all of reality can not only be measured but eventually be entirely explained by science. This worldview is attacked by postmodern thinkers who contend that the world is far more complex and that the modern scientific approach cannot explain all of reality and its phenomena.

The Postmodern Worldview

Postmodern thinking (e.g., Bertens, 1995 ; Sim, 2011 ; Aylesworth, 2015 ) has gained momentum since the 1980s, and although neither the term “postmodernism” nor associated approaches can be defined in a unanimous or precise way, they are characterized by several intertwined concepts, attitudes, and aims. The most basic trait is a general skepticism and the willingness to question literally everything from the ground up—even going so far as to question not only the foundation of any idea, but also the question itself. This includes the own context, the chosen premises, thinking, and the use of language. Postmodernism therefore has a lot in common with science’s curiosity to understand the world: the skeptical attitude paired with the desire to discover how things really are.

Postmodern investigations often start by looking at the language and the broader context of certain phenomena due to the fact that language is the medium in which many of our mental activities—which subsequently influence our behavior—take place. Thus, the way we talk reveals something about how and why we think and act. Additionally, we communicate about phenomena using language, which in turn means that this discourse influences the way we think about or see those phenomena. Moreover, this discourse is embedded in a larger social and historical context, which also reflects back on the use of language and therefore on our perception and interpretation of certain phenomena.

Generally speaking, postmodern investigations aim at detecting and explaining how the individual is affected by societal influences and their underlying, often hidden ideas, structures, or mechanisms. As these influences are often fuzzy, contradictory, and dependent on their context, the individual is subject to a multitude of different causalities, and this already complex interplay is further complicated by the personal history, motivations, aims, or ways of thinking of the individual. Postmodernism attempts to understand all of this complexity as it is in its entirety.

The postmodern approaches have revealed three major general tendencies which characterize the contemporary world: First, societies and the human experience since the 20th century have displayed less coherence and conversely a greater diversity than the centuries before in virtually all areas, e.g., worldviews, modes of thinking, societal structures, or individual behavior. Second, this observation leads postmodern thinkers to the conclusion that the grand narratives which dominated the preceding centuries and shaped whole societies by providing frames of references have lost—at least partially—their supremacy and validity. Examples are religious dogmas, nationalism, industrialization, the notion of linear progress—and modern science because it works according to certain fundamental principles. Third, the fact that different but equally valid perspectives, especially on social phenomena or even whole worldviews, are possible and can coexist obviously affects the concepts of “truth,” “reality,” and “reason” in such a way that these concepts lose their immutable, absolute, and universal or global character, simply because they are expressions and reflections of a certain era, society, or worldview.

At this point, however, it is necessary to clarify a common misconception: Interpreting truth, reality, or reason as relative, subjective, and context-dependent—as opposed to absolute, objective, and context-independent—does naturally neither mean that anything can be arbitrarily labeled as true, real, or reasonable, nor, vice versa, that something cannot be true, real, or reasonable. For example, the often-quoted assumption that postmodernism apparently even denies the existence of gravity or its effects as everything can be interpreted arbitrarily or states that we cannot elucidate these phenomena with adequate accuracy because everything is open to any interpretation ( Sokal, 1996 ), completely misses the point.

First, postmodernism is usually not concerned with the laws of physics and the inanimate world as such but rather focuses on the world of human experience. However, the phenomenon itself, e.g., gravity, is not the same as our scientific knowledge of phenomena—our chosen areas of research, methodological paradigms, data, theories, and explanations—or our perception of phenomena, which are both the results of human activities. Therefore, the social context influences our scientific knowledge, and in that sense scientific knowledge is a social construction ( Hodge, 1999 ).

Second, phenomena from human experience, although probably more dependent on the social context than physical phenomena, cannot be interpreted arbitrarily either. The individual context—such as the personal history, motivations, aims, or worldviews—determines whether a certain behavior makes sense for a certain individual in a certain situation. As there are almost unlimited possible backgrounds, this might seem completely random or arbitrary from an overall perspective. But from the perspective of an individual the phenomenon in question may be explained entirely by a theory for a specific—and not universal—context.

As described above, the postmodern meta-perspective directly deals with human experience and is therefore especially relevant for psychology. Moreover, any discipline—including the knowledge it generates—will certainly benefit from understanding its own (social) mechanisms and implications. We will show below that postmodern thinking not only elucidates the broader context of psychology as an academic discipline but rather that experimental psychology exhibits a number of aspects which can best be described as facets of postmodern thinking although they are not acknowledged as such.

The Postmodern Context of Experimental Psychology

Paradoxically, postmodern elements have been present since the very beginning of experimental psychology although postmodernism gained momentum only decades later. One of the characteristics of postmodernism is the transplantation of certain elements from their original context to new contexts, e.g., the popularity of “Eastern” philosophies and practices in contemporary “Western” societies. These different elements are often juxtaposed and combined to create something new, e.g., new “westernized” forms of yoga ( Shearer, 2020 ).

Similarly, the founders of modern academic psychology took up the scientific method, which was originally developed in the context of the natural sciences, and transplanted it to the study of the human psyche in the hope to repeat the success of the natural sciences. By contrast, methods developed specifically in the context of psychology such as psychoanalysis ( Wax, 1995 ) or introspection according to the Würzburg School ( Hackert and Weger, 2018 ) have gained much less ground in academic psychology. The way we understand both the psyche and psychology has been shaped to a great extent by the transfer of the principles of modern science, namely quantitative measurement and experimental methods, although it is not evident per se that this is the best approach to elucidate mental and behavioral phenomena. Applying the methods of the natural sciences to a new and different context, namely to phenomena pertaining to the human psyche , is a truly postmodern endeavor because it juxtaposes two quite distinct areas and merges them into something new—experimental psychology.

The postmodern character of experimental psychology becomes evident on two levels: First, the subject matter—the human psyche —exhibits a postmodern character since mental and behavioral phenomena are highly dependent on the idiosyncratic contexts of the involved individuals, which makes it impossible to establish unambiguous general laws to describe them. Second, experimental psychology itself displays substantial postmodern traits because both its method and the knowledge it produces—although seemingly objective and rooted in the modern scientific worldview—inevitably contain postmodern elements, as will be shown below.

The Experiment as Simulacrum

The term “simulacrum” basically means “copy,” often in the sense of “inferior copy” or “phantasm/illusion.” However, in postmodern usage “simulacrum” has acquired a more nuanced and concrete meaning. “Simulacrum” is a key term in the work of postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who arguably presented the most elaborate theory on simulacra (1981/1994). According to Baudrillard, a simulacrum “is the reflection of a profound [‘real’] reality” (16/6). Simulacra, however, are more than identical carbon copies because they gain a life of their own and become “real” in the sense of becoming an own entity. For example, the personality a pop star shows on stage is not “real” in the sense that it is their “normal,” off-stage personality, but it is certainly “real” in the sense that it is perceived by the audience even if they are aware that it might be an “artificial” personality. Two identical cars can also be “different” for one might be used as a means of transportation while the other might be a status symbol. Even an honest video documentation of a certain event is not simply a copy of the events that took place because it lies within the medium video that only certain sections can be recorded from a certain perspective. Additionally, the playback happens in other contexts as the original event, which may also alter the perception of the viewer.

The post-structuralist—an approach closely associated with postmodernism—philosopher Roland Barthes pointed out another important aspect of simulacra. He contended that in order to understand something—an “object” in Barthes’ terminology—we necessarily create simulacra because we “ reconstruct [our italics] an ‘object’ in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning [⋯] of this object” ( Barthes, 1963 , 213/214). In other words, when we investigate an object—any phenomenon, either material, mental, or social—we have to perceive it first. This means that we must have some kind of mental representation of the phenomenon/object—and it is crucial to note that this representation is not the same thing as the “real” object itself. All our mental operations are therefore not performed on the “real” object but on mental representations of the object. We decompose a phenomenon in order to understand it, that is, we try to identify its components. In doing so, we effect a change in the object because our phenomenon is no longer the original phenomenon “as it is” for we are performing a mental operation on it, thereby transforming the original phenomenon. Identifying components may be simple, e.g., dividing a tree into roots, trunk, branches, and leaves may seem obvious or even “natural” but it is nevertheless us as investigators who create this structure—the tree itself is probably not aware of it. Now that we have established this structure, we are able to say that the tree consists of several components and name these components. Thus, we have introduced “new” elements into our understanding of the tree. This is the important point, even though the elements, i.e., the branches and leaves themselves “as they are,” have naturally always been “present.” Our understanding of “tree” has therefore changed completely because a tree is now something which is composed of several elements. In that sense, we have changed the original phenomenon by adding something—and this has all happened in our thinking and not in the tree itself. It is also possible to find different structures and different components for the tree, e.g., the brown and the green, which shows that we construct this knowledge.

Next, we can investigate the components to see how they interact with and relate to each other and to the whole system. Also, we can work out their functions and determine the conditions under which a certain event will occur. We can even expand the scope of our investigation and examine the tree in the context of its ecosystem. But no matter what we do or how sophisticated our investigation becomes, everything said above remains true here, too, because neither all these actions listed above nor the knowledge we gain from them are the object itself. Rather, we have added something to the object and the more we know about our object, the more knowledge we have constructed. This addition is what science—gaining knowledge—is all about. Or in the words of Roland Barthes: “the simulacrum is intellect added to object, and this addition has an anthropological value, in that it is man himself, his history, his situation, his freedom and the very resistance which nature offers to his mind” (1963/1972, 214/215).

In principle, this holds truth regarding all scientific investigations. But the more complex phenomena are, the more effort and personal contribution is required on behalf of the investigator to come up with structures, theories, or explanations. Paraphrasing Barthes: When dealing with complex phenomena, more intellect must be added to the object, which means in turn that there are more possibilities for different approaches and perspectives, that is, the constructive element becomes larger. As discussed previously, this does not mean that investigative and interpretative processes are arbitrary. But it is clear from this train of thought that “objectivity” or “truth” in a “positivist,” naïve empiricist “realist,” or absolute sense are not attainable. Nevertheless, we argue here that this is not a drawback, as many critics of postmodernism contend (see above), but rather an advantage because it allows more accurate scientific investigations of true-to-life phenomena, which are typically complex in the case of psychology.

The concepts of simulacra by Baudrillard and Barthes can be combined to provide a description of the experiment in psychology. Accordingly, our understanding of the concept of the “simulacrum” entails that scientific processes—indeed all investigative processes—necessarily need to duplicate the object of their investigation in order to understand it. In doing so, constructive elements are necessarily introduced. These elements are of a varying nature, which means that investigations of one and the same phenomenon may differ from each other and different investigations may find out different things about the phenomenon in question. These investigations then become entities on their own—in the Baudrillardian sense—and therefore simulacra.

In a groundbreaking article on “the meaning and limits of exact science” physicist Max Planck stated that “[a]n experiment is a question which science poses to nature, and a measurement is the recording of nature’s answer” ( Planck, 1949 , 325). The act of “asking a question” implies that the person asking the question has at least a general idea of what the answer might look like ( Heidegger, 1953 , §2). For example: When asking someone for their name, we obviously do not know what they are called, but we assume that they have a name and we also have an idea of how the concept “name” works. Otherwise we could not even conceive, let alone formulate, and pose our question. This highlights how a certain degree of knowledge and understanding of a concept is necessary so that we are able to ask questions about it. Likewise, we need to have a principal idea or assumption of possible mechanisms if we want to find out how more complex phenomena function. It is—at least at the beginning—irrelevant whether these ideas are factually correct or entirely wrong, for without them we would be unable to approach our subject matter in the first place.

The context of the investigator—their general worldview, their previous knowledge and understanding, and their social situation—obviously plays an important part in the process of forming a question which can be asked in the current research context. Although this context may be analyzed along postmodern lines in order to find out how it affects research, production of knowledge, and—when the knowledge is applied—possible (social) consequences, there is a much more profound implication pertaining to the very nature of the experiment as a means to gain knowledge.

Irrespective of whether it is a simple experiment in physics such as Galileo Galilei’s or an experiment on a complex phenomenon from social or cognitive psychology, the experiment is a situation which is specifically designed to answer a certain type of questions, usually causal relationships, such as: “Does A causally affect B?” Excluding the extremely complex discussion on the nature of causality and causation (e.g., Armstrong, 1997 ; Pearl, 2009 ; Paul and Hall, 2013 ), it is crucial to note that we need the experiment as a tool to answer this question. Although we may theorize about a phenomenon and infer causal relationships simply by observing, we cannot—at least according to the prevailing understanding of causality in the sciences—prove causal relationships without the experiment.

The basic idea of the experiment is to create conditions which differ in only one single factor which is suspected as a causal factor for an effect. The influence of all other potential causal relationships is kept identical because they are considered as confounding factors which are irrelevant from the perspective of the research question of the current experiment. Then, if a difference is found in the outcome between the experimental conditions, this is considered as proof that the aspect in question exerts indeed a causal effect. This procedure and the logic behind it are not difficult to understand. However, a closer look reveals that this is actually far from simple or obvious.

To begin with, an experiment is nothing which occurs “naturally” but a situation created for a specific purpose, i.e., an “artificial” situation, because other causal factors exerting influence in “real” life outside the laboratory are deliberately excluded and considered as “confounding” factors. This in itself shows that the experiment contains a substantial postmodern element because instead of creating something it rather re- creates it. This re-creation is of course based on phenomena from the “profound” reality—in the Baudrillardian sense—since the explicit aim is to find out something about this profound reality and not to create something new or something else. However, as stated above, this re-creation must contain constructive elements reflecting the presuppositions, conceptual-theoretical assumptions, and aims of the investigator. By focusing on one factor and by reducing the complexity of the profound reality, the practical operationalization and realization thus reflect both the underlying conceptual structure and the anticipated outcome as they are specifically designed to test for the suspected but hidden or obscured causal relationships.

At this point, another element becomes relevant, namely the all-important role of language, which is emphasized in postmodern thinking (e.g., Harris, 2005 ). Without going into the intricacies of semiotics, there is an explanatory gap ( Chalmers, 2005 )—to borrow a phrase from philosophy of mind—between the phenomenon on the one hand and the linguistic and/or mental representation of it on the other. This relationship is far from clear and it is therefore problematic to assume that our linguistic or mental representations—our words and the concepts they designate—are identical with the phenomena themselves. Although we cannot, at least according to our present knowledge and understanding, fully bridge this gap, it is essential to be aware of it in order to avoid some pitfalls, as will be shown in the examples below.

Even a seemingly simple word like “tree”—to take up once more our previous example—refers to a tangible phenomenon because there are trees “out there.” However, they come in all shapes and sizes, there are different kinds of trees, and every single one of them may be labeled as “tree.” Furthermore, trees are composed of different parts, and the leaf—although part of the tree—has its own word, i.e., linguistic and mental representation. Although the leaf is part of the tree—at least according to our concepts—it is unclear whether “tree” also somehow encompasses “leaf.” The same holds true for the molecular, atomic, or even subatomic levels, where there “is” no tree. Excluding the extremely complex ontological implications of this problem, it has become clear that we are referring to a certain level of granularity when using the word “tree.” The level of granularity reflects the context, aims, and concepts of the investigator, e.g., an investigation of the rain forest as an ecosystem will ignore the subatomic level.

How does this concern experimental psychology? Psychology studies intangible phenomena, namely mental and behavioral processes, such as cognition, memory, learning, motivation, emotion, perception, consciousness, etc. It is important to note that these terms designate theoretical constructs as, for example, memory cannot be observed directly. We may provide the subjects of an experiment a set of words to learn and observe later how many words they reproduce correctly. A theoretical construct therefore describes such relationships between stimulus and behavior, and we may draw conclusions from this observable data about memory. But neither the observable behavior of the subject, the resulting data, nor our conclusions are identical with memory itself.

This train of thought demonstrates the postmodern character of experimental psychology because we construct our knowledge. But there is more to it than that: Even by trying to define a theoretical construct as exactly as possible—e.g., memory as “the process of maintaining information over time” ( Matlin, 2012 , 505) or “the means by which we retain and draw on our past experiences to use this information in the present” ( Sternberg and Sternberg, 2011 , 187)—the explanatory gap between representation and phenomenon cannot be bridged. Rather, it becomes even more complicated because theoretical constructs are composed of other theoretical constructs, which results in some kind of self-referential circularity where constructs are defined by other constructs which refer to further constructs. In the definitions above, for instance, hardly any key term is self-evident and unambiguous for there are different interpretations of the constructs “process,” “maintaining,” “information,” “means,” “retain,” “draw on,” “experiences,” and “use” according to their respective contexts. Only the temporal expressions “over time,” “past,” and “present” are probably less ambiguous here because they are employed as non-technical, everyday terms. However, the definitions above are certainly not entirely incomprehensible—in fact, they are rather easy to understand in everyday language—and it is quite clear what the authors intend to express . The italics indicate constructive elements, which demonstrates that attempts to give a precise definition in the language of science result in fuzziness and self-reference.

Based on a story by Jorge Luis Borges, Baudrillard (1981) found an illustrative allegory: a map so precise that it portrays everything in perfect detail—but therefore inevitably so large that it shrouds the entire territory it depicts. Similarly, Taleb (2007) coined the term “ludic fallacy” for mistaking the model/map—in our context: experiments in psychology—for the reality/territory, that is, a mental or behavioral phenomenon. Similar to the functionality of a seemingly “imprecise” map which contains only the relevant landmarks so the user may find their way, the fuzziness of language poses no problems in everyday communication. So why is it a problem in experimental psychology? Since the nature of theoretical constructs in psychology lies precisely in their very fuzziness, the aim of reaching a high degree of granularity and precision in experimental psychology seems to be unattainable (see the various failed attempts to create “perfect” languages which might depict literally everything “perfectly,” e.g., Carapezza and D’Agostino, 2010 ).

Without speculating about ontic or epistemic implications, it is necessary to be aware of the explanatory gap and to refrain from identifying the experiment and the underlying operationalization with the theoretical construct. Otherwise, this gap is “filled” unintentionally and uncontrollably if the results of an experiment are taken as valid proof for a certain theoretical construct, which is actually fuzzy and potentially operationalizable in a variety of ways. If this is not acknowledged, words, such as “memory,” become merely symbols devoid of concrete meaning, much like a glass bead game—or in postmodern terminology: a hyperreality.

Experiments and Hyperreality

“Hyperreality” is another key term in the work of Jean Baudrillard (1981) and it denotes a concept closely related to the simulacrum. Accordingly, in modern society the simulacra are ubiquitous and they form a system of interconnected simulacra which refer to each other rather than to the real, thereby possibly hiding or replacing the real. Consequently, the simulacra become real in their own right and form a “more real” reality, namely the hyperreality. One may or may not accept Baudrillard’s conception, especially the all-embracing social and societal implications, but the core concept of “hyperreality” is nevertheless a fruitful tool to analyze experimental psychology. We have already seen that the experiment displays many characteristics of a simulacrum, so it is not surprising that the concept of hyperreality is applicable here as well, although in a slightly different interpretation than Baudrillard’s.

The hyperreal character of the experiment can be discussed on two levels: the experiment itself and the discourse wherein it is embedded.

On the level of the experiment itself, two curious observations must be taken into account. First, and in contrast to the natural sciences where the investigator is human and the subject matter (mostly) non-human and usually inanimate, in psychology both the investigator and the subject matter are human. This means that the subjects of the experiment, being autonomous persons, are not malleable or completely controllable by the investigator because they bring their own background, history, worldview, expectations, and motivations. They interpret the situation—the experiment—and act accordingly, but not necessarily in the way the investigator had planned or anticipated ( Smedslund, 2016 ). Therefore, the subjects create their own versions of the experiment, or, in postmodern terminology, a variety of simulacra, which may be more or less compatible with the framework of the investigator. This holds true for all subjects of an experiment, which means that the experiment as a whole may also be interpreted as an aggregation of interconnected simulacra—a hyperreality.

The hyperreal character becomes even more evident because what contributes in the end to the interpretation of the results of the experiment are not the actual performances and results of the individual subjects as they were intended by them but rather how their performances and results are handled, seen, and interpreted by the investigator. Even if the investigator tries to be as faithful as possible and aims at an exact and unbiased measurement—i.e., an exact copy—there are inevitably constructive elements which introduce uncertainty into the experiment. Investigators can never be certain what the subjects were actually doing and thinking so they must necessarily work with interpretations. Or in postmodern terms: Because the actual performances and results of the subjects are not directly available the investigators must deal with simulacra. These simulacra become the investigators’ reality and thus any further treatment—statistical analyses, interpretations, or discussions—becomes a hyperreality, that is, a set of interconnected simulacra which have become “real.”

On the level of the discourse wherein the experiment is embedded, another curious aspect also demonstrates the hyperreal character of experimental psychology. Psychology is, according to the standard definition, the scientific study of mental and behavioral processes of the individual (e.g., Gerrig, 2012 ). This definition contains two actually contradictory elements. On the one hand, the focus is on processes of the individual. On the other hand, the—scientific—method to elucidate these processes does not look at individuals per se but aggregates their individual experiences and transforms them into a “standard” experience. The results from experiments, our knowledge of the human psyche, reflect psychological functioning at the level of the mean across individuals. And even if we assume that the mean is only an estimator and not an exact description or prediction, the question remains open how de-individualized observations are related to the experience of an individual. A general mechanism, a law—which was discovered by abstracting from a multitude of individual experiences—is then ( re -)imposed in the opposite direction back onto the individual. In other words, a simulacrum—namely, the result of an experiment—is viewed and treated as reality, thus becoming hyperreal. Additionally, and simply because it is considered universally true, this postulated law acquires thereby a certain validity and “truth”—often irrespective of its actual, factual, or “profound” truth—on its own. Therefore, it can become impossible to distinguish between “profound” and “simulacral” truth, which is the hallmark of hyperreality.

Measuring the Capacity of the Visual Working Memory

Vision is an important sensory modality and there is extensive research on this area ( Hutmacher, 2019 ). Much of our daily experience is shaped by seeing a rich and complex world around us, and it is therefore an interesting question how much visual information we can store and process. Based on the development of a seminal experimental paradigm, Luck and Vogel (1997) have shown that visual working memory has a storage capacity of about four items. This finding is reported in many textbooks (e.g., Baddeley, 2007 ; Parkin, 2013 ; Goldstein, 2015 ) and has almost become a truism in cognitive psychology.

The experimental paradigm developed by Luck and Vogel (1997) is a prime example of an experiment which closely adheres to the scientific principles outlined above. In order to make a very broad and fuzzy phenomenon measurable, simple abstract forms are employed as visual stimuli—such as colored squares, triangles, or lines, usually on a “neutral,” e.g., gray, background—which can be counted in order to measure the capacity of visual working memory. Reducing the exuberant diversity of the “outside visual world” to a few abstract geometric forms is an extremely artificial situation. The obvious contrast between simple geometrical forms and the rich panorama of the “real” visual world illustrates the pitfalls of controlling supposed confounding variables, namely the incontrollable variety of the “real” world and how we see it. Precisely by abstracting and by excluding potential confounding variables it is possible to count the items and to make the capacity of the visual working memory measurable. But in doing so the original phenomenon—seeing the whole world—is lost. In other words: A simulacrum has been created.

The establishment of the experimental paradigm by Luck and Vogel has led to much research and sparked an extensive discussion how the limitation to only four items might be explained (see the summaries by Brady et al., 2011 ; Luck and Vogel, 2013 ; Ma et al., 2014 ; Schurgin, 2018 ). However, critically, several studies have shown that the situation is different when real-world objects are used as visual stimuli rather than simple abstract forms, revealing that the capacity of the visual working memory is higher for real-world objects ( Endress and Potter, 2014 ; Brady et al., 2016 ; Schurgin et al., 2018 ; Robinson et al., 2020 ; also Schurgin and Brady, 2019 ). Such findings show that the discourse about the mechanisms behind the limitations of the visual working memory is mostly about an artificial phenomenon which has no counterpart in “reality”—the perfect example of a hyperreality.

This hyperreal character does not mean that the findings of Luck and Vogel (1997) or similar experiments employing artificial stimuli are irrelevant or not “true.” The results are true—but it is a local truth, only valid for the specific context of specific experiments, and not a global truth which applies to the visual working memory in general . That is, speaking about “visual working memory” based on the paradigm of Luck and Vogel is a mistake because it is actually about “visual working memory for simple abstract geometrical forms in front of a gray background.”

Free Will and Experimental Psychology

The term “free will” expresses the idea of having “a significant kind of control [italics in the original] over one’s actions” ( O’Connor and Franklin, 2018 , n.p.). This concept has occupied a central position in Western philosophy since antiquity because it has far-reaching consequences for our self-conception as humans and our position in the world, including questions of morality, responsibility, and the nature of legal systems (e.g., Beebee, 2013 ; McKenna and Pereboom, 2016 ; O’Connor and Franklin, 2018 ). Being a topic of general interest, it is not surprising that experimental psychologists have tried to investigate free will as well.

The most famous study was conducted by Libet et al. (1983) , and this experiment has quickly become a focal point in the extensive discourse on free will because it provides empirical data and a scientific investigation. Libet et al.’s experiment seems to show that the subjective impression when persons consciously decide to act is in fact preceded by objectively measurable but unconscious physical processes. This purportedly proves that our seemingly voluntary actions are actually predetermined by physical processes because the brain has unconsciously reached a decision already before the person becomes aware of it and that our conscious intentions are simply grafted onto it. Therefore, we do not have a free will, and consequently much of our social fabric is based on an illusion. Or so the story goes.

This description, although phrased somewhat pointedly, represents a typical line of thought in the discourse on free will (e.g., the prominent psychologists Gazzaniga, 2011 ; Wegner, 2017 ; see Kihlstrom, 2017 , for further examples).

Libet’s experiment sparked an extensive and highly controversial discussion: For some authors, it is a refutation or at least threat to various concepts of free will, or, conversely, an indicator or even proof for some kind of material determinism. By contrast, other authors deny that the experiment refutes or counts against free will. Furthermore, a third group—whose position we adopt for our further argumentation—denies that Libet’s findings are even relevant for this question at all (for summaries of this complex and extensive discussion and various positions including further references see Nahmias, 2010 ; Radder and Meynen, 2013 ; Schlosser, 2014 ; Fischborn, 2016 ; Lavazza, 2016 ; Schurger, 2017 ). Libet’s own position, although not entirely consistent, opposes most notions of free will ( Roskies, 2011 ; Seifert, 2011 ). Given this background, it is not surprising that there are also numerous further experimental studies on various aspects of this subject area (see the summaries by Saigle et al., 2018 ; Shepard, 2018 ; Brass et al., 2019 ).

However, we argue that this entire discourse is best understood along postmodern lines as hyperreality and that Libet’s experiment itself is a perfect example of a simulacrum. A closer look at the concrete procedure of the experiment shows that Libet actually asked his participants to move their hand or finger “at will” while their brain activity was monitored with an EEG. They were instructed to keep watch in an introspective manner for the moment when they felt the “urge” to move their hand and to record this moment by indicating the clock-position of a pointer. This is obviously a highly artificial situation where the broad and fuzzy concept of “free will” is abstracted and reduced to the movement of the finger, the only degree of freedom being the moment of the movement. The question whether this is an adequate operationalization of free will is of paramount importance, and there are many objections that Libet’s setup fails to measure free will at all (e.g., Mele, 2007 ; Roskies, 2011 ; Kihlstrom, 2017 ; Brass et al., 2019 ).

Before Libet, there was no indication that the decision when to move a finger might be relevant for the concept of free will and the associated discourse. The question whether we have control over our actions referred to completely different levels of granularity. Free will was discussed with respect to questions such as whether we are free to live our lives according to our wishes or whether we are responsible for our actions in social contexts (e.g., Beebee, 2013 ; McKenna and Pereboom, 2016 ; O’Connor and Franklin, 2018 ), and not whether we lift a finger now or two seconds later. Libet’s and others’ jumping from very specific situations to far-reaching conclusions about a very broad and fuzzy theoretical construct illustrates that an extremely wide chasm between two phenomena, namely moving the finger and free will, is bridged in one fell swoop.

In other words, Libet’s experiment is a simulacrum as it duplicates a phenomenon from our day-to-day experience—namely free will—but in doing so the operationalization alters and reduces the theoretical construct. The outcome is a questionable procedure whose relationship to the phenomenon is highly controversial. Furthermore, the fact that, despite its tenuous connection to free will, Libet’s experiment sparked an extensive discussion on this subject reveals the hyperreal nature of the entire discourse because what is being discussed is not the actual question—namely free will—but rather a simulacrum. Everything else—the arguments, counter-arguments, follow-up experiments, and their interpretations—built upon Libet’s experiment are basically commentaries to a simulacrum and not on the real phenomena. Therefore, a hyperreality is created where the discourse revolves around entirely artificial phenomena, but where the arguments in this discussion refer back to and affect the real as suggestions are made to alter the legal system and our ideas of responsibility—which, incidentally, is not a question of empirical science but of law, ethics, and philosophy.

All of the above is not meant to say that this whole discourse is meaningless or even gratuitous—on the contrary, our understanding of the subject matter has greatly increased. Although our knowledge of free will has hardly increased, we have gained much insight into the hermeneutics and methodology—and pitfalls!—of investigations of free will, possible consequences on the individual and societal level, and the workings of scientific discourses. And this is exactly what postmodernism is about.

As shown above, there are a number of postmodern elements in the practice of experimental psychology: The prominent role of language, the gap between the linguistic or mental representation and the phenomenon, the “addition of intellect to the object,” the simulacral character of the experiment itself in its attempt to re-create phenomena, which necessarily transforms the “real” phenomenon due to the requirements of the experiment, and finally the creation of a hyperreality if experiments are taken as the “real” phenomenon and the scientific discourse becomes an exchange of symbolic expressions referring to the simulacra created in experiments, replacing the real. All these aspects did not seep gradually into experimental psychology in the wake of postmodernism but have been present since the very inception of experimental psychology as they are necessarily inherent in its philosophy of science.

Given these inherent postmodern traits in experimental psychology, it is puzzling that there is so much resistance against a perceived “threat” of psychology’s scientificness. Although a detailed investigation of the reasons lies outside the scope of this analysis, we suspect there are two main causes: First, an insufficient knowledge of the history of science and understanding of philosophy of science may result in idealized concepts of a “pure” natural science. Second, lacking familiarity with basic tenets of postmodern approaches may lead to the assumption that postmodernism is just an idle game of arbitrary words. However, “science” and “postmodernism” and their respective epistemological concepts are not opposites ( Gergen, 2001 ; Holtz, 2020 ). This is especially true for psychology, which necessarily contains a social dimension because not only the investigators are humans but also the very subject matter itself.

The (over-)reliance on quantitative-experimental methods in psychology, often paired with a superficial understanding of the philosophy of science behind it, has been criticized, either from the theoretical point of view (e.g., Bergmann and Spence, 1941 ; Hearnshaw, 1941 ; Petrie, 1971 ; Law, 2004 ; Smedslund, 2016 ) or because the experimental approach has failed to produce reliable, valid, and relevant applicable knowledge in educational psychology ( Slavin, 2002 ). It is perhaps symptomatic that a textbook teaching the principles of science for psychologists does not contain even one example from experimental psychology but employs only examples from physics, plus Darwin’s theory of evolution ( Wilton and Harley, 2017 ).

On the other hand, the postmodern perspective on experimental psychology provides insight into some pitfalls, as illustrated by the examples above. On the level of the experiment, the methodological requirements imply the creation of an artificial situation, which opens up a gap between the phenomenon as it is in reality and as it is concretely operationalized in the experimental situation. This is not a problem per se as long as is it clear—and clearly communicated!—that the results of the experiment are only valid in a certain context. The problems begin if the movement of a finger is mistaken for free will. Similarly, being aware that local causalities do not explain complex phenomena such as mental and behavioral processes in their entirety also prevents (over-) generalization, especially if communicated appropriately. These limitations make it clear that the experiment should not be made into an absolute or seen as the only valid way of understanding the psyche and the world.

On the level of psychology as an academic discipline, any investigation must select the appropriate level of granularity and strike a balance between the methodological requirements and the general meaning of the theoretical concept in question to find out something about the “real” world. If the level of granularity is so fine that results cannot be tied back to broader theoretical constructs rather than providing a helpful understanding of our psychological functioning, academic psychology is in danger of becoming a self-referential hyperreality.

The postmodern character of experimental psychology also allows for a different view on the so-called replication crisis in psychology. Authors contending that there is no replication crisis often employ arguments which exhibit postmodern elements, such as the emphasis on specific local conditions in experiments which may explain different outcomes of replication studies ( Stroebe and Strack, 2014 ; Baumeister, 2019 ). In other words, they invoke the simulacral character of experiments. This explanation may be valid or not, but the replication crisis has shown the limits of a predominantly experimental approach in psychology.

Acknowledging the postmodern nature of experimental psychology and incorporating postmodern thinking explicitly into our research may offer a way out of this situation. Our subject matter—the psyche —is extremely complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory. And postmodern thinking has proven capable of successfully explaining such phenomena (e.g., Bertens, 1995 ; Sim, 2011 ; Aylesworth, 2015 ). Thus, paradoxically, by accepting and considering the inherently fuzzy nature of theoretical constructs, they often become much clearer ( Ronzitti, 2011 ). Therefore, thinking more along postmodern lines in psychology would actually sharpen the theoretical and conceptual basis of experimental psychology—all the more as experimental psychology has inevitably been a postmodern endeavor since its very beginning.

Author Contributions

RM, CK, and CL developed the idea for this article. RM drafted the manuscript. CK and CL provided feedback and suggestions. All authors approved the manuscript for submission.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Armstrong, D. M. (1997). A World of States of Affairs. Cambridge: CUP.

Google Scholar

Aylesworth, G. (2015). “Postmodernism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. E. N. Zalta. Available online at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

Baddeley, A. (2007). Working Memory, Thought, and Action. Oxford: OUP.

Barthes, R. (1963). “L’activité structuraliste,” in Essais Critiques (pp. 215–218). Paris: Éditions du Seuil. [“Structuralist activity.” Translated by R. Howard (1972). In Critical Essays , ed. R. Barthes (Evanston: Northern University Press), 213–220].

Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacres et Simulation . Paris: Galilée. [ Simulacra and Simulation . Translated by S. F. Glaser (1994). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.]

Baumeister, R. F. (2019). “Self-control, ego depletion, and social psychology’s replication crisis,” in Surrounding Self-control (Appendix to chap. 2), ed. A. Mele (New York, NY: OUP). doi: 10.31234/osf.io/uf3cn

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Beebee, H. (2013). Free Will: An Introduction. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bergmann, G., and Spence, K. W. (1941). Operationism and theory in psychology. Psychol. Rev. 48, 1–14. doi: 10.1037/h0054874

Bertens, H. (1995). The Idea of the Postmodern. A History. London: Routledge.

Brady, T. F., Konkle, T., and Alvarez, G. A. (2011). A review of visual memory capacity: beyond individual items and toward structured representations. J. Vis. 11, 1–34. doi: 10.1167/11.5.4

Brady, T. F., Störmer, V. S., and Alvarez, G. A. (2016). Working memory is not fixed-capacity: more active storage capacity for real-world objects than for simple stimuli. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 113, 7459–7464. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1520027113

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Brass, M., Furstenberg, A., and Mele, A. R. (2019). Why neuroscience does not disprove free will. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 102, 251–263. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.04.024

Capaldi, E. J., and Proctor, R. W. (2013). “Postmodernism and the development of the psychology of science,” in Handbook of the Psychology of Science , eds G. J. Feist and M. E. Gorman (New York, NY: Springer), 331–352.

Carapezza, M., and D’Agostino, M. (2010). Logic and the myth of the perfect language. Logic Philos. Sci. 8, 1–29. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780190869816.003.0001

Chalmers, D. (2005). “Phenomenal concepts and the explanatory gap,” in Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge. New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism , eds T. Alter and S. Walter (Oxford: OUP), 167–194. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171655.003.0009

Cohen, H. F. (2015). The Rise of Modern Science Explained: A Comparative History. Cambridge: CUP.

Endress, A. D., and Potter, M. C. (2014). Large capacity temporary visual memory. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 143, 548–565. doi: 10.1037/a0033934

Fischborn, M. (2016). Libet-style experiments, neuroscience, and libertarian free will. Philos. Psychol. 29, 494–502. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2016.1141399

Gazzaniga, M. S. (2011). Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. New York, NY: Ecco.

Gemignani, M., and Peña, E. (2007). Postmodern conceptualizations of culture in social constructionism and cultural studies. J. Theor. Philos. Psychol. 27–28, 276–300. doi: 10.1037/h0091297

Gergen, K. J. (2001). Psychological science in a postmodern context. Am. Psychol. 56, 803–813. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.56.10.803

Gergen, K. J. (2002). Psychological science: to conserve or create? Am. Psychol. 57, 463–464. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.57.6-7.463

Gerrig, R. J. (2012). Psychology and Life , 20th Edn. Boston: Pearson.

Goldstein, E. B. (2015). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience. Stamford: Cengage Learning.

Goodwin, C. J. (2015). A History of Modern Psychology , 5th Edn. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Hackert, B., and Weger, U. (2018). Introspection and the Würzburg school: implications for experimental psychology today. Eur. Psychol. 23, 217–232. doi: 10.1027/1016-9040/a000329

Haig, B. D. (2014). Investigating the Psychological World: Scientific Method in the Behavioral Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hansen, J. T. (2015). The relevance of postmodernism to counselors and counseling practice. J. Ment. Health Counsel. 37, 355–363. doi: 10.17744/MEHC.37.4.06

Hare-Mustin, R. T., and Marecek, J. (1988). The meaning of difference: gender theory, postmodernism, and psychology. Am. Psychol. 43, 455–464. doi: 10.1037//0003-066X.43.6.455

Harris, R. (2005). The Semantics of Science. London: Continuum.

Hearnshaw, L. S. (1941). Psychology and operationism. Aust. J. Psychol. Philos. 19, 44–57. doi: 10.1080/00048404108541506

Heidegger, M. (1953). Sein und Zeit (7. Aufl.). Tübingen: Niemeyer. [ Being and Time . Translated by J. Stambaugh, revised by D. J. Schmidt (2010). Albany: SUNY Press.]

Held, B. S. (2007). Psychology’s Interpretive Turn: The Search for Truth and Agency in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Washington, DC: APA.

Henry, J. (1997). The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Hodge, B. (1999). The Sokal ‘Hoax’: some implications for science and postmodernism. Continuum J. Media Cult. Stud. 13, 255–269. doi: 10.1080/10304319909365797

Hofmann, S. G. (2002). More science, not less. Am. Psychol. 57:462. doi: 10.1037//0003-066X.57.6-7.462a

Holt, R. R. (2005). “The menace of postmodernism to a psychoanalytic psychology,” in Relatedness, Self-definition and Mental Representation: Essays in Honor of Sidney J. Blatt , eds J. S. Auerbach, K. N. Levy, and C. E. Schaffer (London: Routledge), 288–302. doi: 10.4324/9780203337318_chapter_18

Holtz, P. (2020). Does postmodernism really entail a disregard for the truth? Similarities and differences in postmodern and critical rationalist conceptualizations of truth, progress, and empirical research methods. Front. Psychol. 11:545959. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.545959

Holzman, L. (2006). Activating postmodernism. Theory Psychol. 16, 109–123. doi: 10.1177/0959354306060110

Holzman, L., and Morss, J. (eds). (2000). Postmodern Psychologies, Societal Practice, and Political Life. New York, NY: Routledge.

Hutmacher, F. (2019). Why is there so much more research on vision than on any other sensory modality? Front. Psychol. 10:2246. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02246

Jager, B. (1991). Psychology in a postmodern era. J. Phenomenol. Psychol. 22, 60–71. doi: 10.1163/156916291X00046

Jiménez, J. P. (2015). Psychoanalysis in postmodern times: some questions and challenges. Psychoanal. Inquiry 35, 609–624. doi: 10.1080/07351690.2015.1055221

Kihlstrom, J. F. (2017). Time to lay the Libet experiment to rest: commentary on Papanicolaou (2017). Psycho. Conscious. Theory Res. Pract. 4, 324–329. doi: 10.1037/cns0000124

Kleinert, A. (2009). Der messende Luchs. NTM. Z. Gesch. Wiss. Tech. Med. 17, 199–206. doi: 10.1007/s00048-009-0335-4

Krippner, S. (2001). “Research methodology in humanistic psychology in the light of postmodernity,” in The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology: Leading Edges in Theory, Research, and Practice , eds K. J. Schneider, J. F. Bugental, and J. F. Pierson (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications), 290–304. doi: 10.4135/9781412976268.n22

Kruger, D. J. (2002). The deconstruction of constructivism. Am. Psychol. 57, 456–457. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.57.6-7.456

Kvale S. (ed.) (1992). Psychology and Postmodernism. London: SAGE.

Lavazza, A. (2016). Free will and neuroscience: from explaining freedom away to new ways of operationalizing and measuring it. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 10:262. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00262

Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.

Leahey, T. H. (2017). A History of Psychology: From Antiquity to Modernity , 8th Edn. New York, NY: Routledge.

Leffert, M. (2007). A contemporary integration of modern and postmodern trends in psychoanalysis. J. Am. Psychoanal. Assoc. 55, 177–197. doi: 10.1177/00030651070550011001

Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., and Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain 106, 623–642. doi: 10.1093/brain/106.3.623

Lilienfeld, S. O. (2010). Can psychology become a science? Pers. Individ. Differ. 49, 281–288. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.01.024

Locke, E. A. (2002). The dead end of postmodernism. Am. Psychol. 57:458. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.57.6-7.458a

Luck, S. J., and Vogel, E. K. (1997). The capacity of visual working memory for features and conjunctions. Nature 390, 279–281. doi: 10.1038/36846

Luck, S. J., and Vogel, E. K. (2013). Visual working memory capacity: from psychophysics and neurobiology to individual differences. Trends Cogn. Sci. 17, 391–400. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2013.06.006

Ma, W. J., Husain, M., and Bays, P. M. (2014). Changing concepts of working memory. Nature Neurosci. 17, 347–356. doi: 10.1038/nn.3655

Mandler, G. (2007). A History of Modern Experimental Psychology: From James and Wundt to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Martin, J. (2003). Positivism, quantification and the phenomena of psychology. Theory Psychol. 13, 33–38. doi: 10.1177/0959354303013001760

Martin, J., and Sugarman, J. (2009). Middle-ground theorizing, realism, and objectivity in psychology: a commentary on Held (2007). Theory Psychol. 19, 115–122. doi: 10.1177/0959354308101422

Matlin, M. W. (2012). Cognition , 8th Edn. Hoboken: Wiley.

McKenna, M., and Pereboom, D. (2016). Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction. New York, NY: Routledge.

Mele, A. R. (2007). “Decisions, intentions, urges, and free will: why libet has not shown what he says he has,” in Causation and Explanation , eds J. K. Campbell, M. O’Rourke, and H. S. Silverstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 241–263.

Michell, J. (2003). The quantitative imperative: positivism, naïve realism and the place of qualitative methods in psychology. Theory Psychol. 13, 5–31. doi: 10.1177/0959354303013001758

Nahmias, E. (2010). “Scientific challenges to free will,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Action , eds C. Sandis and T. O’Connor (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell), 345–310. doi: 10.1002/9781444323528.ch44

Nola, R., and Sankey, H. (2014). Theories of Scientific Method. An Introduction. Stocksfield: Acumen.

O’Connor, T., and Franklin, C. (2018). “Free will,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. E. N. Zalta. Available online at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

Olby, R. C., Cantor, G. N., Christie, J. R. R., and Hodge, M. J. S. (eds). (1991). Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge.

Osterlind, S. J. (2019). The Error of Truth: How History and Mathematics Came Together to Form Our Character and Shape Our Worldview. Oxford: OUP.

Parkin, A. J. (2013). Essential Cognitive Psychology (classic edition). London: Psychology Press.

Paul, L. A., and Hall, N. (2013). Causation: A User’s Guide. Oxford: OUP.

Pearl, J. (2009). Causality. Models, Reasoning, and Inference , 2nd Edn. Cambridge: CUP.

Petrie, H. G. (1971). A dogma of operationalism in the social sciences. Philos. Soc. Sci. 1, 145–160. doi: 10.1177/004839317100100109

Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment Now. The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York, NY: Viking.

Planck, M. (1949). The meaning and limits of exact science. Science 110, 319–327. doi: 10.1126/science.110.2857.319

Radder, H., and Meynen, G. (2013). Does the brain “initiate” freely willed processes? A philosophy of science critique of Libet-type experiments and their interpretation. Theory Psychol. 23, 3–21. doi: 10.1177/0959354312460926

Ramey, H. L., and Grubb, S. (2009). Modernism, postmodernism and (evidence-based) practice. Contemp. Fam. Ther. 31, 75–86. doi: 10.1007/s10591-009-9086-6

Robinson, M. M., Benjamin, A. S., and Irwin, D. E. (2020). Is there a K in capacity? Assessing the structure of visual short-term memory. Cogn. Psychol. 121, 101305. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101305

Ronzitti G. (ed.) (2011). Vagueness: A Guide. Dordrecht: Springer.

Roskies, A. L. (2011). “Why Libet’s studies don’t pose a threat to free will,” in Conscious Will and Responsibility , eds W. Sinnott-Armstrong and L. Nadel (Oxford: OUP), 11–22. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195381641.003.0003

Saigle, V., Dubljević, V., and Racine, E. (2018). The impact of a landmark neuroscience study on free will: a qualitative analysis of articles using Libet and colleagues’ methods. AJOB Neurosci. 9, 29–41. doi: 10.1080/21507740.2018.1425756

Schlosser, M. E. (2014). The neuroscientific study of free will: a diagnosis of the controversy. Synthese 191, 245–262. doi: 10.1007/s11229-013-0312-2

Schurger, A. (2017). “The neuropsychology of conscious volition,” in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness , eds S. Schneider and M. Velmans (Malden: Wiley Blackwell), 695–710. doi: 10.1002/9781119132363.ch49

Schurgin, M. W. (2018). Visual memory, the long and the short of it: a review of visual working memory and long-term memory. Attention Percept. Psychophys. 80, 1035–1056. doi: 10.3758/s13414-018-1522-y

Schurgin, M. W., and Brady, T. F. (2019). When “capacity” changes with set size: ensemble representations support the detection of across-category changes in visual working memory. J. Vis. 19, 1–13. doi: 10.1167/19.5.3

Schurgin, M. W., Cunningham, C. A., Egeth, H. E., and Brady, T. F. (2018). Visual long-term memory can replace active maintenance in visual working memory. bioRxiv [Preprint]. doi: 10.1101/381848

Segerstråle U.C.O. (ed.) (2000). Beyond the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse about Science and Society. Albany: SUNY Press.

Seifert, J. (2011). In defense of free will: a critique of Benjamin Libet. Rev. Metaphys. 65, 377–407.

Shearer, A. (2020). The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West. London: Hurst & Company.

Shepard, J. (2018). How libet-style experiments may (or may not) challenge lay theories of free will. AJOB Neurosci. 9, 45–47. doi: 10.1080/21507740.2018.1425766

Sim, S. (2011). The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism , 3rd Edn. London: Routledge.

Sinacore, A. L., and Enns, C. Z. (2005). “Diversity feminisms: postmodern, women-of-color, antiracist, lesbian, third-wave, and global perspectives,” in Teaching and Social Justice: Integrating Multicultural and Feminist Theories in the Classroom , eds C. Z. Enns and A. L. Sinacore (Washington, DC: APA), 41–68. doi: 10.1037/10929-003

Slavin, R. E. (2002). Evidence-based education policies: transforming educational practice and research. Educ. Res. 31, 15–21. doi: 10.3102/0013189X031007015

Smedslund, J. (2016). Why psychology cannot be an empirical science. Integrative Psychol. Behav. Sci. 50, 185–195. doi: 10.1007/s12124-015-9339-x

Sokal, A. D. (1996). A physicist experiments with cultural studies. Lingua Franca 6, 62–64.

Sternberg, R. J., and Sternberg, K. (2011). Cognitive Psychology , 6th Edn. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning.

Stroebe, W., and Strack, F. (2014). The alleged crisis and the illusion of exact replication. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 9, 59–71. doi: 10.1177/1745691613514450

Taleb, N. N. (2007). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York, NY: Random House.

Tarescavage, A. M. (2020). Science Wars II: the insidious influence of postmodern ideology on clinical psychology (commentary on “Implications of ideological bias in social psychology on clinical practice”). Clin. Psychol. Sci. Pract. 27:e12319. doi: 10.1111/cpsp.12319

Teo, T. (2018). Outline of Theoretical Psychology. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wax, M. L. (1995). Method as madness science, hermeneutics, and art in psychoanalysis. J. Am. Acad. Psychoanal. 23, 525–543. doi: 10.1521/jaap.1.1995.23.4.525

Wegner, D. M. (2017). The Illusion of Conscious Will , 2nd Edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wilton, R., and Harley, T. (2017). Science and Psychology. London: Routledge.

Keywords : postmodernism, experimental psychology, experiment, methodology, philosophy of science

Citation: Mayrhofer R, Kuhbandner C and Lindner C (2021) The Practice of Experimental Psychology: An Inevitably Postmodern Endeavor. Front. Psychol. 11:612805. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.612805

Received: 30 September 2020; Accepted: 26 November 2020; Published: 12 January 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Mayrhofer, Kuhbandner and Lindner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Roland Mayrhofer, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Experimental Research Design

• First Online: 10 November 2021

Cite this chapter

• Stefan Hunziker 3 &
• Michael Blankenagel 3  

3103 Accesses

1 Citations

This chapter addresses the peculiarities, characteristics, and major fallacies of experimental research designs. Experiments have a long and important history in the social, natural, and medicinal sciences. Unfortunately, in business and management this looks differently. This is astounding, as experiments are suitable for analyzing cause-and-effect relationships. A true experiment is a brilliant method for finding out if one element really causes other elements. Also, researchers find relevant information on how to write an experimental research design paper and learn about typical methodologies used for this research design. The chapter closes with referring to overlapping and adjacent research designs.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Aronson, E., Ellsworth, P., Carlsmith, J., & Gonzales, M. (1990). Methods of research in social psychology (2nd ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Google Scholar  

Bargh, J., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology., 71 (2), 230–244.

Article   Google Scholar  

Biais, B., & Weber, M. (2009). Hindsight bias, risk perception, and investment performance. Management Science, 55 (6), 1018–1029.

Bortz, J. & Döring, N. (2006). Forschungsmethoden und evaluation . Springer.

Bowlin, K. O., Hales, J., & Kachelmeier, S. J. (2009). Experimental evidence of how prior experience as an auditor influences managers’ strategic reporting decisions. Rev Account Stud, 14 (1), 63–87.

Burmeister, K., & Schade, C. (2007). Are entrepreneurs’ decisions more biased? An experimental investigation of the susceptibility to status quo bias. Journal of Business Venturing, 22 (3), 340–362.

Christensen, L. B. (2007). Experimental methodology . Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.

de Vaus, D. A. (2001). Research design in social research . Reprinted. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Doyle, A. C. (1890). The sign of the four. Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine . Ward, Lock & Co.

Franke, N., Schreier, M., & Kaiser, U. (2010). The “I designed it myself” effect in mass customization. Management Science, 56 (1), 125–140.

Friese, M., Wilhelm, H., & Michaela, W. (2009). The impulsive consumer: Predicting consumer behavior with implicit reaction time measurements. Social Psychology of Consumer Behavior (pp. 335–364). Psychology Press.

Fromkin, H. L., & Streufert, S. (1976). Laboratory experimentation. In M. D. Dunnette (Ed.), Handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (pp. 415–465). Rand McNally College.

Harbring, C., & Irlenbusch, B. (2011). Sabotage in tournaments: evidence from a laboratory experiment. Management Science, 57 (4), 611–627.

Hennig-Thurau, T., Groth, M., Paul, M., & Gremler, D. D. (2006). Are all smiles created equal? How emotional contagion and emotional labor affect service relationships. Journal of Marketing, 70 (3), 58–73.

Homburg, C., Koschate, N., & Hoyer, W. D. (2005). Do Satisfied customers really pay more? A study of the relationship between customer satisfaction and willingness to pay. Journal of Marketing, 69 (2), 84–96.

Johnson, B. (2001). Toward a new classification of nonexperimental quantitative research. Educational Researcher, 30 (2), 3–13.

Koschate-Fischer, N., & Schandelmeier, S. (2014). A Guideline for Designing Experimental Studies in Marketing research and a Critical Discussion of Selected Problem Areas. Journal of Business Economics, 84 (6), 793–826.

Krishnaswamy K. N., Sivakumar A. I. & Mathirajan M. (2009). Management research methodology: Integration of principles, methods and techniques . Dorling Kindersley.

Lödding, H., & Lohmann, S. (2012). INCAP – applying short-term flexibility to control inventories. International Journal of Production Research, 50 (3), 909–919.

Mohnen, A., Pokorny, K., & Sliwka, D. (2008). Transparency, inequity aversion, and the dynamics of peer pressure in teams: Theory and evidence. Journal of Labor Economics, 26 (4), 693–720.

Perdue, B. C., & Summers, J. O. (1986). Checking the success of manipulations in marketing experiments. Journal of Marketing Research, 23 (4), 317–326.

Robson, C. (2011). Real world research: A resource for users of social research methods in applied settings (3rd ed.). Wiley.

Rogers, W. S. (2003). Social psychology: Experimental and critical approaches . Open University Press.

Sandri, S., Schade, C., Mußhoff, O., & Odening, M. (2010). Holding on for too long? An experimental study on inertia in entrepreneurs’ and non-entrepreneurs’ disinvestment choices. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 76 (1), 30–44.

Schoen, K., & Crilly, N. (2012). Implicit methods for testing product preference: Exploratory studies with the affective simon task. In J. Brasset, J. McDonnell, & M. Malpass (Eds.), Proceedings of 8th international design and emotion conference, ed. London: Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

Stier, W. (1999). Empirische Forschungsmethoden . Springer.

Trochim, W. (2005). Research methods: The concise knowledge base. Atomic Dog Pub.

Weber, M., & Zuchel, H. (2005). How do prior outcomes affect risk attitude? Comparing escalation of commitment and the house-money effect. Decision Analysis, 2 (1), 30–43.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Wirtschaft/IFZ – Campus Zug-Rotkreuz, Hochschule Luzern, Zug-Rotkreuz, Zug , Switzerland

Stefan Hunziker & Michael Blankenagel

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stefan Hunziker .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature

About this chapter

Hunziker, S., Blankenagel, M. (2021). Experimental Research Design. In: Research Design in Business and Management. Springer Gabler, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-34357-6_12

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-34357-6_12

Published : 10 November 2021

Publisher Name : Springer Gabler, Wiesbaden

Print ISBN : 978-3-658-34356-9

Online ISBN : 978-3-658-34357-6

eBook Packages : Business and Economics (German Language)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Help | Advanced Search

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

Title: capabilities of gemini models in medicine.

Abstract: Excellence in a wide variety of medical applications poses considerable challenges for AI, requiring advanced reasoning, access to up-to-date medical knowledge and understanding of complex multimodal data. Gemini models, with strong general capabilities in multimodal and long-context reasoning, offer exciting possibilities in medicine. Building on these core strengths of Gemini, we introduce Med-Gemini, a family of highly capable multimodal models that are specialized in medicine with the ability to seamlessly use web search, and that can be efficiently tailored to novel modalities using custom encoders. We evaluate Med-Gemini on 14 medical benchmarks, establishing new state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on 10 of them, and surpass the GPT-4 model family on every benchmark where a direct comparison is viable, often by a wide margin. On the popular MedQA (USMLE) benchmark, our best-performing Med-Gemini model achieves SoTA performance of 91.1% accuracy, using a novel uncertainty-guided search strategy. On 7 multimodal benchmarks including NEJM Image Challenges and MMMU (health & medicine), Med-Gemini improves over GPT-4V by an average relative margin of 44.5%. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Med-Gemini's long-context capabilities through SoTA performance on a needle-in-a-haystack retrieval task from long de-identified health records and medical video question answering, surpassing prior bespoke methods using only in-context learning. Finally, Med-Gemini's performance suggests real-world utility by surpassing human experts on tasks such as medical text summarization, alongside demonstrations of promising potential for multimodal medical dialogue, medical research and education. Taken together, our results offer compelling evidence for Med-Gemini's potential, although further rigorous evaluation will be crucial before real-world deployment in this safety-critical domain.

Submission history

Access paper:.

• HTML (experimental)
• Other Formats

References & Citations

• Google Scholar
• Semantic Scholar

BibTeX formatted citation

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Code, data and media associated with this article, recommenders and search tools.

• Institution

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs .

• - Google Chrome

Intended for healthcare professionals

• Access provided by Google Indexer
• My email alerts
• BMA member login
• Username * Password * Forgot your log in details? Need to activate BMA Member Log In Log in via OpenAthens Log in via your institution

Search form

• Advanced search
• Search responses
• Search blogs
• Beauty sleep:...

Beauty sleep: experimental study on the perceived health and attractiveness of sleep deprived people

• Related content
• Peer review
• John Axelsson , researcher 1 2 ,
• Tina Sundelin , research assistant and MSc student 2 ,
• Michael Ingre , statistician and PhD student 3 ,
• Eus J W Van Someren , researcher 4 ,
• Andreas Olsson , researcher 2 ,
• Mats Lekander , researcher 1 3
• 1 Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, 17177 Stockholm, Sweden
• 2 Division for Psychology, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet
• 3 Stress Research Institute, Stockholm University, Stockholm
• 4 Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, an Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and VU Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Correspondence to: J Axelsson john.axelsson{at}ki.se
• Accepted 22 October 2010

Objective To investigate whether sleep deprived people are perceived as less healthy, less attractive, and more tired than after a normal night’s sleep.

Design Experimental study.

Setting Sleep laboratory in Stockholm, Sweden.

Participants 23 healthy, sleep deprived adults (age 18-31) who were photographed and 65 untrained observers (age 18-61) who rated the photographs.

Intervention Participants were photographed after a normal night’s sleep (eight hours) and after sleep deprivation (31 hours of wakefulness after a night of reduced sleep). The photographs were presented in a randomised order and rated by untrained observers.

Main outcome measure Difference in observer ratings of perceived health, attractiveness, and tiredness between sleep deprived and well rested participants using a visual analogue scale (100 mm).

Results Sleep deprived people were rated as less healthy (visual analogue scale scores, mean 63 (SE 2) v 68 (SE 2), P<0.001), more tired (53 (SE 3) v 44 (SE 3), P<0.001), and less attractive (38 (SE 2) v 40 (SE 2), P<0.001) than after a normal night’s sleep. The decrease in rated health was associated with ratings of increased tiredness and decreased attractiveness.

Conclusion Our findings show that sleep deprived people appear less healthy, less attractive, and more tired compared with when they are well rested. This suggests that humans are sensitive to sleep related facial cues, with potential implications for social and clinical judgments and behaviour. Studies are warranted for understanding how these effects may affect clinical decision making and can add knowledge with direct implications in a medical context.

Introduction

The recognition [of the case] depends in great measure on the accurate and rapid appreciation of small points in which the diseased differs from the healthy state Joseph Bell (1837-1911)

Good clinical judgment is an important skill in medical practice. This is well illustrated in the quote by Joseph Bell, 1 who demonstrated impressive observational and deductive skills. Bell was one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s teachers and served as a model for the fictitious detective Sherlock Holmes. 2 Generally, human judgment involves complex processes, whereby ingrained, often less consciously deliberated responses from perceptual cues are mixed with semantic calculations to affect decision making. 3 Thus all social interactions, including diagnosis in clinical practice, are influenced by reflexive as well as reflective processes in human cognition and communication.

Sleep is an essential homeostatic process with well established effects on an individual’s physiological, cognitive, and behavioural functionality 4 5 6 7 and long term health, 8 but with only anecdotal support of a role in social perception, such as that underlying judgments of attractiveness and health. As illustrated by the common expression “beauty sleep,” an individual’s sleep history may play an integral part in the perception and judgments of his or her attractiveness and health. To date, the concept of beauty sleep has lacked scientific support, but the biological importance of sleep may have favoured a sensitivity to perceive sleep related cues in others. It seems warranted to explore such sensitivity, as sleep disorders and disturbed sleep are increasingly common in today’s 24 hour society and often coexist with some of the most common health problems, such as hypertension 9 10 and inflammatory conditions. 11

To describe the relation between sleep deprivation and perceived health and attractiveness we asked untrained observers to rate the faces of people who had been photographed after a normal night’s sleep and after a night of sleep deprivation. We chose facial photographs as the human face is the primary source of information in social communication. 12 A perceiver’s response to facial cues, signalling the bearer’s emotional state, intentions, and potential mate value, serves to guide actions in social contexts and may ultimately promote survival. 13 14 15 We hypothesised that untrained observers would perceive sleep deprived people as more tired, less healthy, and less attractive compared with after a normal night’s sleep.

Using an experimental design we photographed the faces of 23 adults (mean age 23, range 18-31 years, 11 women) between 14.00 and 15.00 under two conditions in a balanced design: after a normal night’s sleep (at least eight hours of sleep between 23.00-07.00 and seven hours of wakefulness) and after sleep deprivation (sleep 02.00-07.00 and 31 hours of wakefulness). We advertised for participants at four universities in the Stockholm area. Twenty of 44 potentially eligible people were excluded. Reasons for exclusion were reported sleep disturbances, abnormal sleep requirements (for example, sleep need out of the 7-9 hour range), health problems, or availability on study days (the main reason). We also excluded smokers and those who had consumed alcohol within two days of the protocol. One woman failed to participate in both conditions. Overall, we enrolled 12 women and 12 men.

The participants slept in their own homes. Sleep times were confirmed with sleep diaries and text messages. The sleep diaries (Karolinska sleep diary) included information on sleep latency, quality, duration, and sleepiness. Participants sent a text message to the research assistant by mobile phone (SMS) at bedtime and when they got up on the night before sleep deprivation. They had been instructed not to nap. During the normal sleep condition the participants’ mean duration of sleep, estimated from sleep diaries, was 8.45 (SE 0.20) hours. The sleep deprivation condition started with a restriction of sleep to five hours in bed; the participants sent text messages (SMS) when they went to sleep and when they woke up. The mean duration of sleep during this night, estimated from sleep diaries and text messages, was 5.06 (SE 0.04) hours. For the following night of total sleep deprivation, the participants were monitored in the sleep laboratory at all times. Thus, for the sleep deprivation condition, participants came to the laboratory at 22.00 (after 15 hours of wakefulness) to be monitored, and stayed awake for a further 16 hours. We therefore did not observe the participants during the first 15 hours of wakefulness, when they had had a slightly restricted sleep, but had good control over the last 16 hours of wakefulness when sleepiness increased in magnitude. For the sleep condition, participants came to the laboratory at 12.00 (after five hours of wakefulness). They were kept indoors two hours before being photographed to avoid the effects of exposure to sunlight and the weather. We had a series of five or six photographs (resolution 3872×2592 pixels) taken in a well lit room, with a constant white balance (×900l; colour temperature 4200 K, Nikon D80; Nikon, Tokyo). The white balance was differently set during the two days of the study and affected seven photographs (four taken during sleep deprivation and three during a normal night’s sleep). Removing these participants from the analyses did not affect the results. The distance from camera to head was fixed, as was the focal length, within 14 mm (between 44 and 58 mm). To ensure a fixed surface area of each face on the photograph, the focal length was adapted to the head size of each participant.

For the photo shoot, participants wore no makeup, had their hair loose (combed backwards if long), underwent similar cleaning or shaving procedures for both conditions, and were instructed to “sit with a straight back and look straight into the camera with a neutral, relaxed facial expression.” Although the photographer was not blinded to the sleep conditions, she followed a highly standardised procedure during each photo shoot, including minimal interaction with the participants. A blinded rater chose the most typical photograph from each series of photographs. This process resulted in 46 photographs; two (one from each sleep condition) of each of the 23 participants. This part of the study took place between June and September 2007.

In October 2007 the photographs were presented at a fixed interval of six seconds in a randomised order to 65 observers (mainly students at the Karolinska Institute, mean age 30 (range 18-61) years, 40 women), who were unaware of the conditions of the study. They rated the faces for attractiveness (very unattractive to very attractive), health (very sick to very healthy), and tiredness (not at all tired to very tired) on a 100 mm visual analogue scale. After every 23 photographs a brief intermission was allowed, including a working memory task lasting 23 seconds to prevent the faces being memorised. To ensure that the observers were not primed to tiredness when rating health and attractiveness they rated the photographs for attractiveness and health in the first two sessions and tiredness in the last. To avoid the influence of possible order effects we presented the photographs in a balanced order between conditions for each session.

Statistical analyses

Data were analysed using multilevel mixed effects linear regression, with two crossed independent random effects accounting for random variation between observers and participants using the xtmixed procedure in Stata 9.2. We present the effect of condition as a percentage of change from the baseline condition as the reference using the absolute value in millimetres (rated on the visual analogue scale). No data were missing in the analyses.

Sixty five observers rated each of the 46 photographs for attractiveness, health, and tiredness: 138 ratings by each observer and 2990 ratings for each of the three factors rated. When sleep deprived, people were rated as less healthy (visual analogue scale scores, mean 63 (SE 2) v 68 (SE 2)), more tired (53 (SE 3) v 44 (SE 3)), and less attractive (38 (SE 2) v 40 (SE 2); P<0.001 for all) than after a normal night’s sleep (table 1 ⇓ ). Compared with the normal sleep condition, perceptions of health and attractiveness in the sleep deprived condition decreased on average by 6% and 4% and tiredness increased by 19%.

 Multilevel mixed effects regression on effect of how sleep deprived people are perceived with respect to attractiveness, health, and tiredness

• View inline

A 10 mm increase in tiredness was associated with a −3.0 mm change in health, a 10 mm increase in health increased attractiveness by 2.4 mm, and a 10 mm increase in tiredness reduced attractiveness by 1.2 mm (table 2 ⇓ ). These findings were also presented as correlation, suggesting that faces with perceived attractiveness are positively associated with perceived health (r=0.42, fig 1 ⇓ ) and negatively with perceived tiredness (r=−0.28, fig 1). In addition, the average decrease (for each face) in attractiveness as a result of deprived sleep was associated with changes in tiredness (−0.53, n=23, P=0.03) and in health (0.50, n=23, P=0.01). Moreover, a strong negative association was found between the respective perceptions of tiredness and health (r=−0.54, fig 1). Figure 2 ⇓ shows an example of observer rated faces.

 Associations between health, tiredness, and attractiveness

Fig 1  Relations between health, tiredness, and attractiveness of 46 photographs (two each of 23 participants) rated by 65 observers on 100 mm visual analogue scales, with variation between observers removed using empirical Bayes’ estimates

• Download figure
• Open in new tab
• Download powerpoint

Fig 2  Participant after a normal night’s sleep (left) and after sleep deprivation (right). Faces were presented in a counterbalanced order

To evaluate the mediation effects of sleep loss on attractiveness and health, tiredness was added to the models presented in table 1 following recommendations. 16 The effect of sleep loss was significantly mediated by tiredness on both health (P<0.001) and attractiveness (P<0.001). When tiredness was added to the model (table 1) with an estimated coefficient of −2.9 (SE 0.1; P<0.001) the independent effect of sleep loss on health decreased from −4.2 to −1.8 (SE 0.5; P<0.001). The effect of sleep loss on attractiveness decreased from −1.6 (table 1) to −0.62 (SE 0.4; P=0.133), with tiredness estimated at −1.1 (SE 0.1; P<0.001). The same approach applied to the model of attractiveness and health (table 2), with a decrease in the association from 2.4 to 2.1 (SE 0.1; P<0.001) with tiredness estimated at −0.56 (SE 0.1; P<0.001).

Sleep deprived people are perceived as less attractive, less healthy, and more tired compared with when they are well rested. Apparent tiredness was strongly related to looking less healthy and less attractive, which was also supported by the mediating analyses, indicating that a large part of the found effects and relations on appearing healthy and attractive were mediated by looking tired. The fact that untrained observers detected the effects of sleep loss in others not only provides evidence for a perceptual ability not previously subjected to experimental control, but also supports the notion that sleep history gives rise to socially relevant signals that provide information about the bearer. The adaptiveness of an ability to detect sleep related facial cues resonates well with other research, showing that small deviations from the average sleep duration in the long term are associated with an increased risk of health problems and with a decreased longevity. 8 17 Indeed, even a few hours of sleep deprivation inflict an array of physiological changes, including neural, endocrinological, immunological, and cellular functioning, that if sustained are relevant for long term health. 7 18 19 20 Here, we show that such physiological changes are paralleled by detectable facial changes.

These results are related to photographs taken in an artificial setting and presented to the observers for only six seconds. It is likely that the effects reported here would be larger in real life person to person situations, when overt behaviour and interactions add further information. Blink interval and blink duration are known to be indicators of sleepiness, 21 and trained observers are able to evaluate reliably the drowsiness of drivers by watching their videotaped faces. 22 In addition, a few of the people were perceived as healthier, less tired, and more attractive during the sleep deprived condition. It remains to be evaluated in follow-up research whether this is due to random error noise in judgments, or associated with specific characteristics of observers or the sleep deprived people they judge. Nevertheless, we believe that the present findings can be generalised to a wide variety of settings, but further studies will have to investigate the impact on clinical studies and other social situations.

Importantly, our findings suggest a prominent role of sleep history in several domains of interpersonal perception and judgment, in which sleep history has previously not been considered of importance, such as in clinical judgment. In addition, because attractiveness motivates sexual behaviour, collaboration, and superior treatment, 13 sleep loss may have consequences in other social contexts. For example, it has been proposed that facial cues perceived as attractive are signals of good health and that this recognition has been selected evolutionarily to guide choice of mate and successful transmission of genes. 13 The fact that good sleep supports a healthy look and poor sleep the reverse may be of particular relevance in the medical setting, where health estimates are an essential part. It is possible that people with sleep disturbances, clinical or otherwise, would be judged as more unhealthy, whereas those who have had an unusually good night’s sleep may be perceived as rather healthy. Compared with the sleep deprivation used in the present investigation, further studies are needed to investigate the effects of less drastic acute reductions of sleep as well as long term clinical effects.

Conclusions

People are capable of detecting sleep loss related facial cues, and these cues modify judgments of another’s health and attractiveness. These conclusions agree well with existing models describing a link between sleep and good health, 18 23 as well as a link between attractiveness and health. 13 Future studies should focus on the relevance of these facial cues in clinical settings. These could investigate whether clinicians are better than the average population at detecting sleep or health related facial cues, and whether patients with a clinical diagnosis exhibit more tiredness and are less healthy looking than healthy people. Perhaps the more successful doctors are those who pick up on these details and act accordingly.

Taken together, our results provide important insights into judgments about health and attractiveness that are reminiscent of the anecdotal wisdom harboured in Bell’s words, and in the colloquial notion of “beauty sleep.”

What is already known on this topic

Short or disturbed sleep and fatigue constitute major risk factors for health and safety

Complaints of short or disturbed sleep are common among patients seeking healthcare

The human face is the main source of information for social signalling

What this study adds

The facial cues of sleep deprived people are sufficient for others to judge them as more tired, less healthy, and less attractive, lending the first scientific support to the concept of “beauty sleep”

By affecting doctors’ general perception of health, the sleep history of a patient may affect clinical decisions and diagnostic precision

Cite this as: BMJ 2010;341:c6614

We thank B Karshikoff for support with data acquisition and M Ingvar for comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript, both without compensation and working at the Department for Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden.

Contributors: JA designed the data collection, supervised and monitored data collection, wrote the statistical analysis plan, carried out the statistical analyses, obtained funding, drafted and revised the manuscript, and is guarantor. TS designed and carried out the data collection, cleaned the data, drafted, revised the manuscript, and had final approval of the manuscript. JA and TS contributed equally to the work. MI wrote the statistical analysis plan, carried out the statistical analyses, drafted the manuscript, and critically revised the manuscript. EJWVS provided statistical advice, advised on data handling, and critically revised the manuscript. AO provided advice on the methods and critically revised the manuscript. ML provided administrative support, drafted the manuscript, and critically revised the manuscript. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript.

Funding: This study was funded by the Swedish Society for Medical Research, Rut and Arvid Wolff’s Memory Fund, and the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.

Competing interests: All authors have completed the Unified Competing Interest form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf (available on request from the corresponding author) and declare: no support from any company for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any companies that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous 3 years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.

Ethical approval: This study was approved by the Karolinska Institutet’s ethical committee. Participants were compensated for their participation.

Participant consent: Participant’s consent obtained.

Data sharing: Statistical code and dataset of ratings are available from the corresponding author at john.axelsson{at}ki.se .

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode .

• ↵ Deten A, Volz HC, Clamors S, Leiblein S, Briest W, Marx G, et al. Hematopoietic stem cells do not repair the infarcted mouse heart. Cardiovasc Res 2005 ; 65 : 52 -63. OpenUrl Abstract / FREE Full Text
• ↵ Doyle AC. The case-book of Sherlock Holmes: selected stories. Wordsworth, 1993.
• ↵ Lieberman MD, Gaunt R, Gilbert DT, Trope Y. Reflection and reflexion: a social cognitive neuroscience approach to attributional inference. Adv Exp Soc Psychol 2002 ; 34 : 199 -249. OpenUrl CrossRef
• ↵ Drummond SPA, Brown GG, Gillin JC, Stricker JL, Wong EC, Buxton RB. Altered brain response to verbal learning following sleep deprivation. Nature 2000 ; 403 : 655 -7. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed
• ↵ Harrison Y, Horne JA. The impact of sleep deprivation on decision making: a review. J Exp Psychol Appl 2000 ; 6 : 236 -49. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Huber R, Ghilardi MF, Massimini M, Tononi G. Local sleep and learning. Nature 2004 ; 430 : 78 -81. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Spiegel K, Leproult R, Van Cauter E. Impact of sleep debt on metabolic and endocrine function. Lancet 1999 ; 354 : 1435 -9. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Kripke DF, Garfinkel L, Wingard DL, Klauber MR, Marler MR. Mortality associated with sleep duration and insomnia. Arch Gen Psychiatry 2002 ; 59 : 131 -6. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Olson LG, Ambrogetti A. Waking up to sleep disorders. Br J Hosp Med (Lond) 2006 ; 67 : 118 , 20. OpenUrl PubMed
• ↵ Rajaratnam SM, Arendt J. Health in a 24-h society. Lancet 2001 ; 358 : 999 -1005. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Ranjbaran Z, Keefer L, Stepanski E, Farhadi A, Keshavarzian A. The relevance of sleep abnormalities to chronic inflammatory conditions. Inflamm Res 2007 ; 56 : 51 -7. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Haxby JV, Hoffman EA, Gobbini MI. The distributed human neural system for face perception. Trends Cogn Sci 2000 ; 4 : 223 -33. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Rhodes G. The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty. Annu Rev Psychol 2006 ; 57 : 199 -226. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Todorov A, Mandisodza AN, Goren A, Hall CC. Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes. Science 2005 ; 308 : 1623 -6. OpenUrl Abstract / FREE Full Text
• ↵ Willis J, Todorov A. First impressions: making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychol Sci 2006 ; 17 : 592 -8. OpenUrl Abstract / FREE Full Text
• ↵ Krull JL, MacKinnon DP. Multilevel modeling of individual and group level mediated effects. Multivariate Behav Res 2001 ; 36 : 249 -77. OpenUrl CrossRef Web of Science
• ↵ Ayas NT, White DP, Manson JE, Stampfer MJ, Speizer FE, Malhotra A, et al. A prospective study of sleep duration and coronary heart disease in women. Arch Intern Med 2003 ; 163 : 205 -9. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Bryant PA, Trinder J, Curtis N. Sick and tired: does sleep have a vital role in the immune system. Nat Rev Immunol 2004 ; 4 : 457 -67. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Cirelli C. Cellular consequences of sleep deprivation in the brain. Sleep Med Rev 2006 ; 10 : 307 -21. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Irwin MR, Wang M, Campomayor CO, Collado-Hidalgo A, Cole S. Sleep deprivation and activation of morning levels of cellular and genomic markers of inflammation. Arch Intern Med 2006 ; 166 : 1756 -62. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Schleicher R, Galley N, Briest S, Galley L. Blinks and saccades as indicators of fatigue in sleepiness warnings: looking tired? Ergonomics 2008 ; 51 : 982 -1010. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Wierwille WW, Ellsworth LA. Evaluation of driver drowsiness by trained raters. Accid Anal Prev 1994 ; 26 : 571 -81. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Horne J. Why we sleep—the functions of sleep in humans and other mammals. Oxford University Press, 1988.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH METHODS

Related Papers

Journal of Computing in Higher Education

Gary Morrison

Cut Eka Para Samya

In Part 4, we begin a more detailed discussion of some of the methodologies that educational researchers use. We concentrate here on quantitative research, with a separate chapter devoted to group-comparison experimental research, single-subject experimental research, correlational research, causal-comparative research, and survey research. In each chapter, we not only discuss the method in some detail, but we also provide examples of published studies in which the researchers used one of these methods. We conclude each chapter with an analysis of a particular study's strengths and weaknesses.

Educational Technology Research and Development

Open Access Publishing Group

The experimental method is more exact compared to other quantitative methods, although it can have drawbacks, related to the positivist epistemological position. Determining exactly the educational effects of existing, innovative and new pedagogical concepts, programmes, systems, models, methods and instruments commands the use of experiments in pedagogical research. If completed pedagogical research projects are analysed, the conclusion is experiments are used much less frequently than other methods. This study determines the prevalence of parallel-group designs as compared to how frequently other experimental designs are used. A representative sample of scientific and professional papers was analysed and it was ascertained that the conducted experiments partly satisfy relevant theoretical and methodological criteria. It is evident that result reliability when using the experimental method is still relatively low, which may have negative effects on the development of pedagogical sciences and related scientific disciplines, as well as on scientifically grounded innovation of the teaching and learning process and enhancement of the educational process. Hence, it is crucial to use multi-method research approaches (employing the experimental method as appropriate, depending on the research problem) in preparing (and approving) doctoral dissertations, writing reviews and publishing research papers.

Mind, Brain, and Education

Melina Uncapher

Thomas C Reeves

Several years ago, Professor Dave Merrill from Utah State University drew a metaphorical line in the sand that called for anyone committed to serious instructional technology research to join him and his associates in pursuing an empirical research agenda based upon the fact that instruction is a science (Merrill, Drake, Lacey, & Pratt, 1996). He also contended that instructional design is a technology derived from the science of instruction based upon principles that could be verified by empirical data.

Electronic Journal of e-Learning

Jodie Jenkinson

Educational Researcher

Richard Lehrer

Robert Tennyson

RELATED PAPERS

Nilesh Pancholi

Das Gesundheitswesen

Daniel Roulland

Maria Poptsova

… Engineering Structures (ERES …

Elias Dimitrakopoulos

Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics

Suman Ganguly

Physica C: …

Jurnal Ilmiah Vastuwidya

Surya Cipta

Fitria Apriliani

andrea sabino

ecancermedicalscience

Domenico Fuoco

Paulo Freire. Revista de Pedagogía Crítica

Pablo Jiménez Cea

European Journal of Neurology

Susan Wortman-Jutt

Yaping Shao

Thermochimica Acta

CP Reghunadhan Nair

Food Technology and Biotechnology

Anales de la Facultad de Medicina

Antioxidants

Soi Moi Chye

Proceedings of SPIE

Ilan Nachman

Signum, v. 22, n. 1

Signum Revista da ABREM

Florent Pled

Bioresource Technology

Salman Jafarpour

Oxford University Press eBooks

Colin Faragher

hukyytj jkthjfgr

Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Clayton Queiroz

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• Search Menu
• Advance Articles
• Editor's Choice
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access
• About Health Education Research
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Dispatch Dates
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

Introduction, implications.

• < Previous

An experimental study of effects on schoolchildren of exposure to point-of-sale cigarette advertising and pack displays

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Melanie Wakefield, Daniella Germain, Sarah Durkin, Lisa Henriksen, An experimental study of effects on schoolchildren of exposure to point-of-sale cigarette advertising and pack displays, Health Education Research , Volume 21, Issue 3, July 2006, Pages 338–347, https://doi.org/10.1093/her/cyl005

• Permissions Icon Permissions

By creating a sense of familiarity with tobacco, cigarette advertising and bold packaging displays in stores where children often visit may help to pre-dispose them to smoking. A total of 605 ninth-grade students were randomly allocated to view a photograph of a typical convenience store point-of-sale which had been digitally manipulated to show either cigarette advertising and pack displays, pack displays only or no cigarettes. Students then completed a self-administered questionnaire. Compared with those who viewed the no cigarettes, students either in the display only condition or cigarette advertising condition perceived it would be easier to purchase tobacco from these stores. Those who saw the cigarette advertising perceived it would be less likely they would be asked for proof of age, and tended to think a greater number of stores would sell cigarettes to them, compared with respondents who saw no tobacco products. Respondents in the display only condition tended to recall displayed cigarette brands more often than respondents who saw no cigarettes. Cigarette advertising similarly influenced students, and tended to weaken students' resolve not to smoke in future. Retail tobacco advertising as well as cigarette pack displays may have adverse influences on youth, suggesting that tighter tobacco marketing restrictions are needed.

As usual avenues for tobacco advertising have become increasingly unavailable, the visual presence of the cigarette pack and the in-store pack display has become an essential means of communicating brand imagery for tobacco companies [ 1, 2 ]. Tobacco industry documents indicate that tobacco companies understood the importance of the cigarette pack display as a means of promoting brand awareness: ‘The aim of the exercise is instant recognition: (Horizon) along with Benson & Hedges, that's given us full gold and blue blocks on display and that helps our brands stand out’ [ 3 ].

It has been demonstrated that widespread in-store tobacco advertising can influence and distort adolescents' perceptions regarding popularity, use and availability of tobacco. Experimental research has shown that adolescents exposed to retail tobacco advertising perceived significantly easier access to cigarettes than a control group [ 4 ]. Advertising exposure also influenced perceptions about smoking prevalence, peer approval for smoking and support for tobacco control policies [ 4 ]. Another study [ 5 ] found that schoolchildren exposed to point-of-sale advertisements were more likely than those exposed to a photograph of a pack of cigarettes to report positive attributes of users of the brand of cigarettes. Further research has shown that adolescents who reported at least weekly exposure to retail tobacco marketing were more likely to have experimented with smoking [ 6 ] and that in-store branded tobacco advertising and promotion are strongly associated with choice of cigarette brands by adolescents [ 7 ].

The presence of tobacco in stores alongside everyday items such as confectionery, soft drinks and magazines helps to create a sense of familiarity with tobacco products. This familiarity may act to de-emphasize the serious health consequences of tobacco consumption and increase youth perceptions of the prevalence of smoking, as well as their perceived access to tobacco products [ 8 ]. The presence of tobacco products in neighbourhood retail outlets conveys to young people that tobacco use is desirable, socially acceptable and prevalent in society [ 9 ].

In Victoria, Australia, point-of-sale tobacco advertising has been banned since January 2002, and cigarette pack displays are limited to one pack face per brand variant. An observational study conducted following the implementation of this law found that, although compliance was evident, displays emerged that tilted packs towards the floor, providing maximum viewing of the top of all the packs queued in the display and a consequently greater visual and colourful presence for each brand variant [ 10 ]. Efforts to enhance the displays to achieve maximum ‘standout’ for cigarette brands has led researchers to be concerned that cigarette displays at the point-of-sale may be just as influential as traditional advertising, acting as a promotional tool for cigarette brands.

The present study aims to examine the effect of cigarette packaging displays and advertising at the point-of-sale on students' smoking-related perceptions, beliefs and intentions. Given previous research, we hypothesized that exposure to retail tobacco advertising and cigarette pack displays at the point-of-sale would influence students' perceptions about ease of access to cigarettes, normative beliefs about smoking, perceived harms of smoking, perceived popularity of cigarette brands and future intentions to smoke.

Participants

Data collection took place in late 2003 and early 2004 from a convenience sample of ninth-grade students (aged 14–15 years) from five secondary schools in Victoria, Australia: two Catholic boys schools, a private co-educational school, a public co-educational school and a Catholic girls' school. Three of the schools were located in areas that had above average level of socio-economic advantage for Victoria, while the other two schools were in areas that had below average level of socio-economic advantage [ 11 ].

Schools were approached by a research assistant to determine willingness to have their students involved in the study. Schools were informed that the study would be an investigation into product advertising in convenience stores. Specific detail about examining tobacco marketing was not disclosed, to avoid risk of priming student's responses. Information was sent home to students' parents, along with a consent form, to obtain parental permission to be involved in the study. Out of 886 ninth-grade students approached, active parental permission was obtained for 605 students, resulting in an overall response rate of 68%.

The between-subjects experimental study design was adapted from that developed by Henriksen et al. [ 4 ]. Within each classroom, participants were randomly exposed to one of the three point-of-sale conditions under the guise of pre-testing a news story written for teenagers.

No cigarettes

A convenience store's point-of-sale area with no visible tobacco presence.

Cigarette display

A convenience store's point-of-sale area with a cigarette pack display, but no cigarette advertising (as required by the current law in Victoria).

Cigarette advertising

A point-of-sale area with both cigarette advertising and cigarette pack displays.

A colour photograph of a point-of-sale section of a convenience store was digitally altered to create the three versions of the same retail environment. Adobe Photoshop was used to eliminate cigarette advertising and cigarette pack displays and to replace these with other non-tobacco product advertising or displays. No retailers or customers were visible in the photographs and references to store names were removed.

Trained research assistants visited schools to administer the study. Before the experimental manipulation, all students took part in a discussion designed to increase the salience of general brand advertising and display. Following the discussion of brand advertising, students within classrooms were randomly assigned to see photographs of one of the three conditions. A research assistant then read aloud a fictional news story about teen eating habits and visits to convenience stores. Students were told to look carefully at the photograph they were given of the point-of-sale, and asked to imagine walking around the shop noticing what to buy, while they listened to the story.

After the news story had been read out, the research assistant collected all point-of-sale photographs to ensure students did not subsequently refer back to them. Students then completed a brief questionnaire. The entire data collection session was completed during a class period of ∼45 min.

Dependent variables

Perceived difficulty of access.

Students were asked about their own, and students their age, likelihood of being able to purchase tobacco from the pictured stores, using a Likert scale ranging from ‘1 = very easy’ to ‘5 = very hard’. These two questions were combined and averaged to create an overall measure of perceived difficulty of purchasing tobacco (α > 0.70). Students were also asked about the likelihood they would be asked for proof of age if they tried to purchase cigarettes at the store, using a Likert scale ranging from ‘1 = very likely’ to ‘5 = very unlikely’. Finally, students were asked to estimate how many stores in their neighbourhood would sell tobacco to them, and to other students their age.

Normative beliefs

Perceived prevalence of smoking was assessed by asking how many out of 100 classmates in their year level, 100 high school students and 100 adults they thought smoked cigarettes at least once a week. Perceived approval of smoking was measured by asking students how much they agreed or disagreed on a Likert scale ranging from ‘1 = strongly agree’ to ‘5 = strongly disagree’ with a range of attributes to describe smokers (‘A teenager who smokes cigarettes seems … cool; successful; smart; healthy; athletic; and popular’). Perceived peer approval was measured by asking students whether most students their age, and most high school students, ‘think it's ok to smoke cigarettes once in a while’. These two questions measured on a Likert scale from ‘1 = strongly agree’ to ‘5 = strongly disagree’, were combined and averaged to create an overall ‘peer approval of smoking’ measure (α > 0.70).

Perceived harm

Students were asked whether they agreed or disagreed that ‘Smoking can harm your health’, and how dangerous they thought it was to smoke <10 cigarettes a day, and one or two cigarettes occasionally, on a Likert scale ranging from ‘1 = not dangerous’ to ‘3 = very dangerous’.

Perceived brand popularity

We asked students to nominate the brand they would be likely to smoke if they were a smoker, and then nominate what they thought were the most popular brands smoked by students their age and adults. In order to examine whether cigarette displays and advertising influenced which brands students thought were the most popular, the cigarette brands that were clearly advertised in the cigarette advertising condition (Benson & Hedges, Lucky Strike, Horizon, Marlboro and Winfield) were coded as ‘advertised brands’. Similarly, those cigarette brands that were the most prominent in the cigarette display and cigarette advertising conditions were coded as ‘prominently displayed brands’. These brands were determined by their visual presentation in the display, based on the criteria of being presented by a block of colour or a block with a distinctive feature of the pack (e.g. the prominent stripe on Alpine and Winfield packs). Prominently displayed brands included Horizon, Dunhill, Winfield, Benson & Hedges and Alpine.

Intention to smoke

To gauge students' future intentions to smoke, students were asked whether they thought they would smoke a cigarette at any time during the next year, with responses being ‘definitely not, probably not, probably yes or definitely yes’. Students who had not tried smoking were also asked if they thought they would try a cigarette soon, and also ‘If one of your best friends were to offer you a cigarette, would you smoke it?’ with responses also being ‘definitely not, probably not, probably yes or definitely yes’.

Descriptive variables

Students indicated their sex, whether they had any older brothers or sisters, or a parent or guardian who smoked and how many, if any, of their five best friends smoked. Students were also asked to indicate their frequency of visiting a convenience store, with response options being ‘practically every day, a few times a week, about once a week, about once a month or hardly ever’.

Following the method of Pierce et al. [ 12 ], students were categorized as non-susceptible never smokers, susceptible never smokers or experimenters. Students who reported trying smoking (even just a few puffs) were coded as ‘experimenters’. Students who had never smoked and indicated they would definitely not try smoking cigarettes ‘soon’ and ‘in the next year’, and would definitely not smoke a cigarette if one of their best friends were to offer them one, were coded as ‘non-susceptible never smokers’. Students who did not answer ‘definitely no’ to each circumstance were considered ‘susceptible never smokers’.

Finally, an ‘others smoking’ variable was created by combining students' responses to whether they had at least one parent who smokes, a sibling who smoked and how many of the respondent's best friends smoked. This was a continuous variable, where a lower value indicated less exposure to cigarettes from family and friends.

Chi-square analysis was used to determine whether random assignment produced equivalent groups in relation to tobacco use and other characteristics. To test hypotheses, generalized estimating equations (GEEs) with random effects were used to determine the effects of exposure to the three point-of-sale conditions, controlling for sex, smoking susceptibility and social and familial exposure to smoking. The school attended by respondents was treated as a random effect to account for clustering by school.

Logistic regression analyses were used to examine the relationship between the cigarette brands respondents thought were most popular among students and adults, and those cigarette brands that were advertised or displayed in the pictured stores.

Sample characteristics

The sample of 605 students consisted of 51% females, 41% of students had tried smoking cigarettes and 9% currently smoked. Of those who had not yet tried smoking, 11% said they would probably or definitely try a cigarette soon and 8% reported they would probably or definitely try smoking during the next year. Over one-third (36%) of students had at least one parent or guardian who smoked, 21% said they had at least one older brother or sister who smoked and 45% reported at least one of their best friends smoked.

Table I shows that the characteristics of students were equally distributed by condition in relation to demographic characteristics and peer and family exposure to smoking.

Student characteristics, by exposure condition

Regardless of experimental condition, students who were experimenting with smoking visited convenience stores more often ( ⁠ X ¯ = 3.1, on scale of 1 = practically every day to 5 = hardly ever) than those students who were susceptible non-smokers ( ⁠ X ¯ = 3.5) ( P = 0.002) and those who were non-susceptible non-smokers ( ⁠ X ¯ = 3.7) ( P < 0.01). There was no significant difference between the latter two conditions.

Perceived access to tobacco

Table II indicates that students who were exposed to either the cigarette display or the cigarette advertising conditions perceived it would be less difficult for either themselves or students their age to purchase tobacco, than those students who saw the no cigarettes condition ( P = 0.000). In addition, students who saw the cigarette advertising condition were less likely than respondents in the no cigarettes condition to report that they would be asked for proof of age if they tried to buy cigarettes ( P = 0.01).

Perceived access to cigarettes, by exposure condition

Covariates = sex, ‘susceptibility’ and ‘others smoking’, random effects = school id.

Scale: 1 (very easy) to 5 (very hard).

Significantly different ( P < 0.01) to condition a: no cigarettes.

Scale: 1 (very likely) to 5 (very unlikely).

Significantly different ( P < 0.05) to condition a: no cigarettes.

Trend towards a significant difference ( P < 0.1) between condition a: no cigarettes.

On average, students reported that at least one store in their neighbourhood would sell cigarettes to them ( ⁠ X ¯ = 1.5 stores) or students their age ( ⁠ X ¯ = 1.8 stores). Students who saw the no cigarettes condition tended to report a lower number of neighbourhood stores would sell them cigarettes ( ⁠ X ¯ = 1.4 stores), compared with those who saw the cigarette advertising point-of-sale ( ⁠ X ¯ = 1.7 stores) ( P = 0.07). There was no exposure effect for the number of neighbourhood stores that participants thought would sell to ‘students their age’.

Normative beliefs about smoking

On average, students thought ∼30% of students their age smoke cigarettes at least once a week, with no significant differences between the experimental conditions ( Table III ).

Perceived smoking prevalence, by exposure condition

Covariates = sex, susceptibility and others smoking, random effects = school id.

Trend towards a significant difference ( P < 0.1) between condition b: cigarette display.

Significantly different ( P < 0.05) to condition b: cigarette display.

Scale: 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree).

However, those in the cigarette advertising condition reported on average that ∼52% of high school students smoked at least once a week, compared with those who saw the cigarette display condition, who estimated ∼48% of high school students smoke ( P = 0.03).

Respondents who saw the cigarette advertising condition also thought a higher proportion of adults smoke (63%) than did those who saw the cigarette display condition (59%).

There was little variation between experimental conditions and students' approval of smoking ( P > 0.10). Students also tended to disagree with statements attributing positive characteristics to teenagers who smoked, with no significant differences between experimental conditions ( Table III ).

Perceived harm of smoking

Regardless of survey condition, most students agreed that smoking can harm your health ( ⁠ X ¯ = 1.3, SD = 0.81). Over half of students (52%) considered smoking <10 cigarettes a day ‘very dangerous’. However, only 15% of students thought smoking one or two cigarettes occasionally was ‘very dangerous’, with a further 55% considering it ‘a little dangerous’ and 25% ‘not dangerous’. Students who saw the cigarette advertising condition were significantly more likely ( P = 0.02) to consider smoking one or two cigarettes occasionally as less dangerous ( ⁠ X ¯ = 1.9), than were respondents who saw the cigarette display condition ( ⁠ X ¯ = 2.1) ( Table IV ).

Perceived harm of smoking, by exposure condition

Covariates = sex, susceptibility and others smoking; random effects = school id.

Scale: 1 (not dangerous) to 3 (very dangerous).

Future intentions to smoke

Students who saw the cigarette advertising condition tended to be more likely to suggest that they would smoke a cigarette any time during the following year ( ⁠ X ¯ = 2.0, on scale of ‘1 = definitely not’ to ‘4 = definitely yes’), compared with those who saw the cigarette display condition ( ⁠ X ¯ = 1.9) ( P = 0.07).

Examining only students who had not yet tried smoking ( n = 348), those who had been exposed to the cigarette advertising condition, were more likely to suggest that they would smoke a cigarette if one of their best friends offered them one, compared with those who saw the cigarette display condition ( P = 0.039). However, no significant exposure effects existed for never-smokers' intentions to try a cigarette ‘soon’ or during the following year ( P > 0.1).

Perceived popularity of cigarette brands and brand preferences

As shown in Table V , when asked to name cigarette brands that were most popular among adult smokers, students exposed to the cigarette advertising condition were more likely to report a cigarette brand that was advertised (Winfield, Horizon, Benson & Hedges, Marlboro or Lucky Strike), compared with those exposed to the no cigarettes condition ( P = 0.049). There was also a trend for respondents exposed to the cigarette advertising condition to report one of the advertised brands, more than those who saw the cigarette display condition ( P = 0.057).

Perceived cigarette brand popularity and brand preferences, by exposure condition

Tobacco brands that were prominently visible in the displays of the cigarette display and cigarette advertising conditions (i.e. Winfield, Horizon, Benson & Hedges, Alpine and Dunhill) were also related to which brands students thought were most popular among adults. There was a trend for those respondents who saw the cigarette display condition to report brands that were prominently displayed, more than students who saw the no cigarettes condition ( P = 0.052).

There were no significant differences between conditions in relation to the brands respondents thought were popular among students their age who smoke. However, when respondents were asked which cigarette brand they would try if they smoked, those exposed to the cigarette advertising condition also tended to report an advertised brand more than those who saw the cigarette display condition ( P = 0.09).

This experimental study aimed to assess whether cigarette pack displays in retail stores influenced students' perceptions about smoking in ways similar to those previously found for retail tobacco advertising [ 4 ].

Overall, our results suggest that the presence of cigarettes at the point-of-sale—whether cigarette display only or display plus tobacco advertising—increased students' perceptions about the ease of purchasing cigarettes. In addition, the presence of tobacco advertising decreased students' perceived likelihood of being asked for proof of age and tended to increase perceptions of the number of stores that would sell them cigarettes. This pattern of findings suggests the presence of displays in retail stores serve to create the perception among students that cigarettes are easily available and accessible in their community, while the presence of tobacco advertising further strengthens perceived ease of accessibility of cigarettes.

Our study findings also suggest that, like advertising, the cigarette pack display is an effective vehicle for promoting brand recall, as evidenced by the cigarette brands reported by students to be the most popular among adult smokers. High recall of cigarette brand names that were advertised in the pictured store, as well as cigarette brands that were prominent in the displays, suggests that tobacco companies are effectively using cigarette packaging displays as a communication device for creating and reinforcing brand awareness and recognition [ 7 ]. Cigarette brand names that were advertised in the pictured store also tended to affect the brands of cigarettes students reported they might try if they did smoke.

Exposure to point-of-sale advertising, but not displays, tended to weaken student's resolve not to smoke in the following year. Findings also indicate that exposure to advertising, as opposed to a pack display on its own, influenced whether students would accept a cigarette from one of their friends if they offered. In countries such as the United States in which point-of-sale tobacco advertising has continued to proliferate, this is great cause for concern. US Federal Trade Commission figures indicate that in 2002, tobacco companies spent $12.47 billion on tobacco promotion, a considerable amount of which was focused on the point-of-sale [ 13 ].

No effects were observed for most variables measuring perceived harm from smoking, except the perceived danger of smoking one or two cigarettes per day, which was significantly higher among those in the cigarette advertising condition than those in the cigarette display condition. Overall, we found no consistent effects of cigarette advertising or display on peer approval for smoking, the likelihood of positive attributes being ascribed to smokers, or overall harm from smoking. Several of the perceived harm variables and all the smoker attribute variables were highly skewed in a desirable direction, suggesting established views about smoking which may not be easy to manipulate by a single experimental exposure.

Results from this study support some of the findings of the experimental study of Henriksen et al. [ 4 ]. Like Henriksen et al. , we found that retail cigarette advertising induced significantly easier perceived access to cigarettes and increased perceived smoking prevalence of high school students and adults. However, unlike Henriksen et al. , cigarette advertising did not influence perceived prevalence of smoking among students their own age. We also did not find advertising to induce more positive appraisals of smokers. There were differences between our study and that of Henriksen et al. that may have accounted for differences in some findings. These include the fact that students are no longer routinely exposed to retail tobacco advertising in Australia, that Australian students were in Grade 9 (aged 14–15 years) only, rather than Grades 8 and 9 (aged 13–15 years), that Australian students were recruited by active, rather than passive consent, and that Australian students were exposed to only one photograph in each condition, rather than two. However, given these methodological and contextual differences, the fact that we did find experimental effects for most variables used in both studies suggests that the effects are relatively robust.

There were several study limitations, not the least of which was that the stimulus conditions were artificial. Students briefly viewed one of the three manipulated point-of-sale photographs in a classroom setting, rather than visiting a real store environment, so they may have perceived the photographs to be unrealistic, and may not have responded in the same way to a real life situation. However, the fact we did observe effects of the different point-of-sale photographs on students' perceptions about smoking even with a brief exposure suggests that the influence of cigarette advertising as well as pack displays in the actual store environment is probably considerable.

In addition, we cannot be certain that the responses of students who saw the store with no cigarettes were not influenced by their own memory of what a convenience store ‘usually’ looks like (i.e. in Victoria, with the presence of tobacco displays). Over one-third (35%, n = 74) of students who saw the store with no cigarettes reported that they had seen tobacco products, even though there was none present, and this false recognition was positively related to being a current smoker ( P < 0.05). It is possible that due to students' misperceptions of what they had seen during the experimental manipulation we may not have achieved a ‘clean’ measure of student's exposure to a store with no tobacco products, and therefore condition effects may have been diluted. This also suggests that cigarette displays maybe extremely salient to smoking teenagers and can potentially influence their recollections of this type of marketing.

We confirmed the finding of Henriksen et al. [ 6 ] that frequency of student visits to convenience stores was associated with a higher likelihood of experimenting with cigarettes, one interpretation being that there may be long-term cumulative effects of point-of-sale exposure. Future research might aim to study students' brand recall and perceptions about smoking immediately after exiting real stores that vary in dominance of cigarette displays at the point-of-sale.

A strength of the study was that we were able to randomize students to conditions within classrooms, rather than randomizing whole classrooms, as in the study of Henriksen et al. [ 4 ]. However, since data collection occurred within classrooms and only five schools were involved, there may still be clustering of respondents, so to be conservative, we analysed the data using GEEs with random effects, where the school attended by respondents was treated as a random effect. We also controlled for sex, smoking susceptibility and social and familial exposures to cigarette smoking. Thus, the effects observed in this study are independent of these other well-known influences on smoking perceptions.

This study suggests that the presence of cigarette displays at the point-of-sale, even in the absence of cigarette advertising, has adverse effects on students' perceptions about ease of access to cigarettes and brand recall, both factors that increase the risk of taking up smoking [ 14, 15 ]. Furthermore, the study suggests that cigarette advertising has similar effects, and may also weaken students' firm intentions not to smoke in future, a measure that also strongly predicts smoking uptake [ 16 ]. These findings make a case for eliminating cigarette advertising at the point-of-sale, and also for placing cigarettes out of sight in the retail environment, as has happened in Saskatechewan, Canada [ 17 ]. Such a move may help to curb the alarming rate of smoking uptake among adolescents.

Google Scholar

Google Preview

• advertising

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1465-3648
• Print ISSN 0268-1153
• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.