Ecological Validity and “Ecological Validity”

Abstract

Egon Brunswik coined the term <i>ecological validity</i> to refer to the correlation between perceptual cues and the states and traits of a stimulus. Martin Orne adapted the term to refer to the generalization of experimental findings to the real world outside the laboratory. Both are legitimate uses of the term because the ecological validity of the cues in an experiment determines the ecological validity of the experiment itself.