Chapter 6. The Psychology of Construal in the Design of Field Experiments

In this chapter, we argue that good experimental design and analysis accounts for the notion of construal, a person's subjective interpretation of a stimulus, a situation, or an experimental intervention. Researchers have long been aware of motivations, such as self-presentation, profit seeking, or distrust, that can influence experimental participants' behavior. Other drivers of behavior include consistency, identity, social norms, perceptions of justice, and fairness—all factors that shape individuals' construal of the immediate situation. Experimental tools and interventions are similarly “construed” in ways that shape what participants are responding to. We review the logic and findings around the notion of construal and the ways in which considerations of construal should affect how experiments are designed and deployed so as to achieve a shared construal between participants and investigators. These considerations also apply to the replication and scale-up of experimental studies. We finally discuss how construals of the experimental hypotheses can influence investigators' construal of the data.