Outline one advantage and one limitation of using labs to conduct research rather than a natural setting

An advantage of conducting lab - based research is increased internal validity. This means that the psychologist can be more sure that they are measuring what they intended to measure. For example, if somebody was investigating the effect of caffeine on attention then they could control the environment in a lab so that nothing was likely to distract participants from the task. Meanwhile, in natural settings, participants may be exposed to other stimuli such as music which may affect the outcome of the study. This makes it more difficult to establish a cause-effect relationship when research is not conducted in a lab.However, whilst lab settings do offer increased control over confounding variables, too much control can result in a lack of generalisability to real life settings. This is because participants are in a significantly different environment to that which they would normally find themselves in. Therefore, they may not behave in the same way that they normally would. This means that conclusions drawn from lab based research may not necessarily be applicable to everyday life.