I have recently started reading about the difference between field experiments and lab experiments. Most of my work is now hovering over understanding human behavior and relating it to the impact on design environments, albeit impacts of human behavior in general give valuable insights. It's interesting how reviewer's comments towards journal and conference papers relating to understanding decision making in design gravitate towards realism of the experiments and more often than not rejecting the papers on this intuitive but misleading idea of "realism".
Still in process of reading, but I intend to keep filling this post up with arguments for lab experiments.
An interesting read for those who argue for field experiments and consider lab experiments as "unrealistic". It's interesting how a lot of social scientists have been arguing about this for ages but as engineers we disregard the effects of bias towards loss aversion or judgement biases.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/326/5952/535
