Lab

• Easy to attract funding because of the prestige of science
• Takes place in one settings meaning researchers can conduct research like any other day job
• Most seek to gain informed consent as it may be required for them to receive funding
• Participants are rarely asked to do anything illegal
• Benefit to society

  Milgram and Zimbardo claim the shocking findings of their experiment outweigh the harm done to the participants
• Controlled conditions means researchers can isolate variables
• You can establish a cause and effect relationship
• High in reliability as it is easy to replicate and is a detached method
• Impossible to identify all possible variables that exert influence as society is too complex
• Can't control variables that were present in the past
• Time - small scale samples mean you will need to conduct consecutive experiments to achieve large amounts of data
• Some experiments conducted have resulted in harm such as Milgram's
• Deception may be present; researchers may mislead people as to the nature of the experiment, such as Milgram
• Could lack consent for example, if participants are children or disabled
• Milgram stated participants would receive electric shocks however none were used

  3 participants had seizures showing that physical and psychological pain was inflicted
• Reductionist

  human behavior cannot be explained through cause and effect
• Lack of external validity as it is an artificial environment
• Hawthorne effect as participants are aware they are in an experiment
• Small scale = unrepresentative
• Lab experiments are favored by positivists