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CHAPTER 6: Independent Groups Designs 213FIGURE 6.4How similar can experiments be to real-life situations such as children testifying in court?participants in two field experiments were asked to answer questions aboutrisks during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic (Lee, Schwarz, Taubman, & Hou,2010). The first experiment was conducted on a university campus and the secondwas conducted in shopping malls and near downtown businesses. Individualswho agreed to participate were randomly assigned to an experimentalcondition, in which the confederate sneezed and coughed prior to the administrationof a brief questionnaire, or to a control condition (no sneezes, coughs).Results indicated that this simple manipulation influenced participants’ perceptionsof risk. Participants in the sneeze condition, compared to the no-sneezecondition, rated more highly their risk of contracting a serious disease, theirrisk of a heart attack before age 50, and their risk of dying from a crime or accident.Interestingly, compared to participants in the control condition, individualsin the sneeze condition also were more likely to favor federal spending forflu vaccines rather than the creation of “green” jobs. Because this experimentwas carried out in a natural setting, it is more likely to be representative of“real-world” conditions. Thus, we can be more confident that the results willgeneralize to other real-world settings than if an artificial situation had beencreated in the laboratory.