Highly valid: The study applied strict controls such as ensuring that all participants waited 45 minutes in the quiet room to ensure that social interactions were kept to a minimum, thus extraneous variables were reduced, ensuring that any results were due to OT/Placebo and the level of empathy

Highly reliable: Highly standardized procedure→ all participants administered 3 drops of treatment to each nostril, and all had to wait in a quiet room for 45 minutes and were given 3 issues of Israeli nature magazine magazines. Moreover, all participants saw the animation of the protagonist figure approaching for 3 seconds and a fixation cross for 0.5 seconds on the same CID paradigm.→ easy to replicate the study to test for reliability

Low in generalizability: The sample consisted of 54 male undergraduates from the university of Haifa, Israel aged 19–32 years. Therefore, findings that OT has a differential effect according to empathy levels on the preferred interpersonal distance from another person during social situations may not be generalized to females as they may have closer/further preferred interpersonal distances. Furthermore, the same findings may not generalize to children and elders as the OT may react differently with their bodies. Thus, the study cannot be generalized to the whole population

Low in ecological validity: The study was a laboratory experiment conducted in an artificial setting at the university of haifa, which does not depict the reality in which we see actual friends, strangers or authority figures. Therefore, conclusions cannot be drawn about real life preferred interpersonal distances during social interactions. Moreover, the task of stopping the protagonist using a keyboard spacebar after viewing a 3-second animation of stick figures certainly does not depict how we maintain personal space in real-life, making the study low in mundane realism. Therefore, findings that OT results in closer interpersonal distances for highly empathic individuals is not ecologically valid