Validity in Burger's experimental design

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Evaluation of the choice of design:

This experiment included a randomized design between two conditions where the equal gender ratio was kept. One included the base participants' condition and the other was a modeled refusal condition. This design contains a bit of deception like the original one did. It also contains similar word lists, prods and tools that were used in the original study. However, two confederates were used because there were two experimental conditions.

This experiment was a partial replication of the original obedience study.

The experimental design that the researcher used is different than that used for the original obedience study adopted partly due to ethical concerns about replicating a full study like the one done originally.

The intensity of giving electric shocks could not go beyond 150-volts in terms of administering an intense level of shock to the learner. As described by the researcher, if the participant continued to express reluctance after the fourth prod, the experimenter would end the study. No participant was allowed to press any more switches after pressing the150-volt switch.

The current researcher ensured certain precautions in screening the participants for mental illness signs (anxiety, depression), which could be exacerbated as a result of participating in this research, in warning them during the experiment three times, debriefing them without delay and so forth. Furthermore, under ethical considerations and additional safeguards sub-headings, the author talks about the measures he took as a researcher to ensure the validity of the experimental design in the study.

Threats to Validity:

1. Author has equal sample size which is good and not a violation of the assumptions for validity.
2. Some explanations by the researcher is spurious.
3. As experiments are done to rule out alternative explanations, the author instead is contemplating other possible explanations which can be a threat to the validity of the findings of this study.
4. Correlations have been weak throughout for many variables. The null and causal hypotheses for this study seem to be unclear in the findings the author has provided in the discussion at the end of the paper.
5. Both the internal and the external validities for the findings of this experiment are not satisfactory. The findings are not generalizable to the general population.
6. As ...