what is an extraneous variable
Best Answer: Extraneous Variables are undesirable variables that influence the relationship between the variables that an experimenter is examining. Another way to think of this, is that these are variables the influence the outcome of an experiment, though they are not the variables that are actually of interest.f you are looking for the answer to Xsquared + 1 = 26, then X can be either a +5 or a -5 so it is a variable. An extraneous variable would be a variable that does not really affect the answer or the experiment (as in 'an irrelevant variable'). Source(s): Me.