POTENTIAL CONFOUNDING VARIABLES
Environmental factors
○
● Many environmental factors can be held constant
● Those environmental factors that cannot be held
constant can be balanced across different
experimental conditions
● Researchers hope to avoid systematic bias
● Participant characteristics
Confounds dealing with participant characteristics are further
addressed through experimental design
● Between-subjects design: Each has equal probability
of assignment to any one of the experiment conditions;
confounds minimized using random assignment
● Within-subjects design: Each participant engages in
every experiment condition one or more times;
counterbalancing minimized confounds
Environmental factors
○
● Many environmental factors can be held constant
● Those environmental factors that cannot be held
constant can be balanced across different
experimental conditions
● Researchers hope to avoid systematic bias
● Participant characteristics
Confounds dealing with participant characteristics are further
addressed through experimental design
● Between-subjects design: Each has equal probability
of assignment to any one of the experiment conditions;
confounds minimized using random assignment
● Within-subjects design: Each participant engages in
every experiment condition one or more times;
counterbalancing minimized confounds
