information:classification
Generalizability across situations

Psychological realism is heightened if people find themselves engrossed in a real event. To accomplish this, researchers sometimes tell the participants a cover story —a false description of the study's purpose. If however, the experimenters were to tell the participants the purpose of the experiment then such a procedure would be low in psychological realism. In everyday life, no one knows when emergencies are going to occur and people do not have time to plan responses to them. This means that the kinds of psychological processes triggered would differ widely from those of a real emergency, reducing the psychological realism of the study.