Piliavin - Evaluation

Question 1

What are 2 strengths of Piliavin et al.’s study?

Answer 1

• High ecological validity due to the study being performed using deception in a real life setting.
• Large sample size means that it can be easily generalisable to New Yorkers.

Question 2

What are 2 weaknesses of Piliavin et al.’s study?

Answer 2

• Ethical issues as the participants did not give informed consent, were not debriefed and were deceived. Could have led to feelings of distress and guilt.
• Difficulty to control extraneous variables such as participants seeing more than one trial.