Generalization Issues in Experiments Involving Multidimensional Decisions

Can the causal effects estimated in an experiment be generalized to real-world scenarios? This question lies at the heart of social science studies. External validity primarily assesses whether experimental effects persist across different settings, implicitly presuming the consistency of experimental effects with their real-life counterparts. However, we argue that this presumed consistency may not always hold, especially in experiments involving multi-dimensional decision processes, such as conjoint experiments. We introduce a formal model to elucidate how attention and salience effects lead to three types of inconsistencies between experimental findings and real-world phenomena: amplified effect magnitude, effect sign reversal, and effect importance reversal. We derive testable hypotheses from each theoretical outcome and test these hypotheses using data from various existing conjoint experiments and our own experiments. Drawing on our theoretical framework, we propose several recommendations for experimental design aimed at enhancing the generalizability of survey experiment findings.