666 Psychological Experimentation Addressing Practical Concerns
of use includes better utilization of speech for communica-
tion between person and computer (Zue, 1999) and the de-
velopment of handheld devices capable of great versatility
(Guttag, 1999). The forces driving the continuing informa-
tion revolution are psychological and social as well as tech-
nological, and its effects are of all three types as well.
Communicating and Effecting the Practical
Implications of Experimentation
It should perhaps go without saying that researchers who do
experiments that are explicitly addressed to practical ques-
tions should make clear in the reporting of their results what
the practical implications of their findings are. However, our
experience suggests that many researchers whose work is
motivated by practical concerns have difficulty in describing,
in terms that intelligent lay readers will find easy to under-
stand, precisely why an experiment they have done is impor-
tant from a practical point of view and how the results might
be applied.
Sometimes the problem is vagueness. Pointing out that a
particular finding is relevant to a specified problem is much
less helpful than giving examples of how the finding might be
applied. The reader would like to know who, not counting
other researchers, would benefit from being aware of the find-
ing, and how they might make use of it. Because the abstract
of a journal article is usually the first (and often the only)
thing a reader sees, abstracts of applied experimental articles
should state explicitly what the author believes are the most
important practical implications of the reported results.
Another common problem is overstatement. In this case,
claims are made regarding real-world relationships that go
beyond what the experimental results will support. Some-
times results obtained with college students performing artifi-
cial tasks after minutes, or at best hours, of experience with
them, and for the purpose of fulfilling a psychology course re-
quirement, are generalized without qualification to the perfor-
mance of motivated experienced professionals in operational
contexts. We are not suggesting that the results of laboratory
experiments with college students can have no relevance to
real-world situations, but simply noting that it is easy to ex-
trapolate from the one situation to the other in an insuffi-
ciently guarded way. Generally speaking, what the laboratory
experiments produce is suggestive evidence of relationships
that need to be verified in the applied contexts of interest. We
think it very important that the implications of experimental
results be stated with appropriate qualifications; overstate-
ment contributes negatively to the credibility of the field.
We believe that experimentation motivated strictly by the-
oretical questions often yields results that have practical
implications that are never made explicit. Researchers whose
primary interests are theoretical are generally more likely to
develop and communicate the theoretical implications of
their findings than any practical applications they may have,
and they may not be the best equipped to spell out the latter.
Psychology and society could be well served by psycholo-
gists who are interested in and capable of explicating (in lay
terms) ways in which the results of theoretically motivated
experimentation could be applied to real-world problems to
good effect.
Finally, we need to recognize that having practical impli-
cations—even practical implications that have been spelled
out—does not necessarily mean having practical impact. In
order to have impact, an actual application must be made.
Many results of experiments have practical implications that
have not been applied to full advantage in practical situations,
despite having been recognized for what they are. One may
question, for example, whether the results from experimenta-
tion on learning have had the impact they should have had on
education, or whether the results of studies of negotiation and
conflict resolution have been applied to maximum effect to
actual conflict situations, or whether what has been discov-
ered about human error has been applied as extensively and
effectively as it could be to reduce the consequences of such
error in industrial, medical, and other contexts that have
implications for public safety.
Ensuring impact requires different skills than does spelling
out implications. Consideration of how this can be done is
beyond the scope of this chapter, but we do want to support a
point made by Geissler (1917b), who argued that applications
are best made by experts in the fields in which the findings
are believed to apply. This means that psychologists who
would like to have a role in seeing that the results of research
are actually applied to real-world problems need either to
work with experts in the relevant fields or to become experts
themselves. However well intentioned, efforts to apply the
findings of experimentation to real-world problems by re-
searchers who have only a superficial knowledge of areas of
application can result in harm both to psychology and to the
areas of interest.SOURCES OF ADDITIONAL INFORMATIONMany journals publish applied experimental work. Examples
are given in Table 24.3. There are several professional orga-
nizations with which researchers doing applied experimental
work in psychology tend to affiliate. Notable among them
in the United States are the APA’s Divisions 21 (Applied
Experimental and Engineering Psychology), 3 (Experimental