2
Effect of Congressional Role-Playing Experience on Students' Attention to
Constituency & PACs
In recent years political scientists have begun to advocate the merits of
experiments as a research design. According to Elinor Ostrom (1997, 17), “By adding
experimental methods to the battery of field methods already used extensively, the
political science of the twenty-first century will advance more rapidly in acquiring well
grounded theories of human behavior and of the effects of diverse institutional
arrangement on behavior.”
There is, however, a long-standing controversy concerning the use of college
students as subjects in many social behavioral experiments. Some argue that the
“sophomore effect” generates findings that lack external validity because the subjects
are naïve or inexperienced (see Sears 1986; Abdolmohammadi and Wright 1987;
Gordon, Slade and Schmitt 1986, 1987; McNemar 1946; Peterson 2001; Slade and
Gordon 1988). Yet, other studies show little evidence of any significant difference in
behavior between student- and nonstudent subjects (see Dobbins, Lane and Steiner
1988; Greenberg 1987; Griffin and Kacmar 1991; Locke 1986; Remus 1996; Roth and
Schoumaker 1983), or between expert- and novice decision makers (see Christensen-
Szalanski, et. al 1983; Gaeth and Shanteau 1984; Wright, Bolger and Rowe 1993),
especially when the experimental task does not require specific expertise, training or
experience.
In this paper, I report findings from replications of an experiment with
congressional staffers reported in Chin, Bond and Geva (2000). They found that
constituency status of access-seekers was the primary decision cue for members of
Convention