The “Science of the Sophomore” Revisited: from Conjecture to Empiricism

The controversy over using college students as subjects in applied research has been a topic of philosophical discourse and empirical investigation. Thirty-two studies are reviewed in which students and nonstudents participated as subjects under identical conditions. In studies reporting statistical tests of between-group differences, the preponderance of findings indicated that the experimental results differed in the two samples. By contrast, no major differences associated with the type of subject were reported in the majority of studies which did not employ statistical procedures to compare the findings in the two samples. Explanations for differences in the sample are offered, and serve as a basis for recommendations for future research.