The laboratory offers a high degree of experimental control. That is why laboratories were devised in the first place, and that is why scientists often forsake real-world problems to enter them. This chapter is an argument that, given our present state of knowledge, control is more often a vice than a virtue. It is not experimental control that is now desirable, but rather regularity of results. The time for control will come, but psychology entered the laboratory too quickly. Psychology must first spend time observing and quantifying behavior in its fuller state of complexity. This chapter describes the rationale for this approach, followed by examples of research that has applied it to the topic of human memory.

The best way to start arguing for a flight from the laboratory in the area of memory research is to examine how we entered the laboratory in the first place. Ebbinghaus (1885/1964), in arguing that human memory could be studied in a scientific fashion, provided as clear a definition of the experimental method as exists in the psychological literature. In a section titled “The Method of Natural Science,” he writes as follows: