The "Science of the Sophomore" Revisited: From Conjecture to Empiricism

The reliability of behavioral research has regularly been challenged due to its strong dependence on college students as experimental subjects. Despite this criticism, the practice of using student subjects continues to dominate many areas of behavioral research. The literature that allows comparisons between the responses of students and nonstudents to the same stimulus situation, thus controlling design factors that frustrate attempts to assess the comparability of subject types, is reviewed. Thirty-two studies are included in the review. In studies reporting statistical tests of between-group differences, the majority of findings indicate that the experimental results differ between students and nonstudents. In contrast, no major differences associated with the type of subject are found in most of the studies that did not employ statistical procedures to compare the findings in the 2 samples. Subject familiarity with the experimental task is one explanation for the apparent discrepancy in the overall findings.