Mundane Realism

Mundane Realism is a measure of external validity, or the extent to which experimental findings can be generalized to the real world. It asks: How close to real life are the materials and procedures used in a certain study?

For example, a study on memory would ask participants to memorize a list of three-letter nonsense words. A test of Mundane Realism would ask: How similar to real-life memory tasks is the activity? Can the findings of such an experiment be applied to real-life memory tasks?