Studies may use deception if it is necessary to answer the research question.
Disclosure of Research Hypothesis
If, in order to counter the demand effect, researchers cannot disclose their research hypotheses, the failure to disclose is not considered deception.
General statements about the purpose of the research, as well as a full description of the research tasks and activities, should be provided in the consent form.
Inappropriate Use of Deception
The IRB discourages the use of deception when:
- Alternative methods can be used that will yield valid study results.
- The deception deprives participants of the opportunity to protect their own interests.
- The missing information affects the participants’ ability to assess the risks of participation.
Justification for Using Deception
If the subjects will be deceived, the ethical and regulatory requirement to fully inform subjects must be waived by the IRB.
There are three criteria that must be met in order for the waiver to be approved. In addition, it is usually necessary to debrief subject after the research.
- The risk must be no more than minimal.
“Minimal risk means that the probability and magnitude of harm or discomfort anticipated in the research are not greater in and of themselves than those ordinarily encountered in daily life or during the performance of routine physical or psychological examinations or tests.”
- The rights and welfare of the subjects will not be adversely affected.
- The research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver. This does not mean that it would be inconvenient to conduct the study without the waiver. It means that deception is necessary to accomplish the goals of the research.
Ameliorating Deception
Protocols must include procedures for ameliorating possible negative effects of deception. In addition to thorough debriefing that explains the need for deception, emphasis should be placed on correcting any false feedback given to participants about their performance, competency, or other personal characteristics.
Participants whose behavior was recorded without their knowledge, such as during a fake “break” in study, should be given the opportunity to request that the recording be destroyed.
If a study was designed to provoke negative behaviors, participants should be told that most people react the way they reacted and that their behavior was a normal response.
Debriefing
Debriefing for participants who were deceived includes a description of the deception and an explanation about why it was necessary. The discussion should presented in lay language and should be sufficiently detailed that participants will understand how and why they were deceived. If the study included multiple deceptions, each should be addressed.
If participants were filmed without their knowledge, they must be given the option to ask that the researchers do not use the film
Delayed Debriefing
Delayed debriefing is an option if participants are part of a group that may share information about their experience in the research.
If researchers will use a delayed debriefing, the consent form must state additional information will be available at the study and participants’ contact information should be collected. The contact information should not be linked to the study data.
Informed Consent
Informed consent forms and scripts may never contain deception. Researchers may not make false statements during the consent process.
Review Type for Protocols Involving Deception
Research involving deception cannot be screened for exemption.
Generally, research using the following deceptions may be reviewed using expedited procedures:
- Confederates: Attributing statements to or providing feedback from non-existent individuals or confederates in another room. Using actors in videos presented to participants.
- Giving people impersonal false information: Information about the performance of groups that participants will use to measure their own performance, for example, “Most Duke students can solve these anagrams in 3-7 minutes.”
- Priming designed to focus participants’ attention or awareness, but not on a sensitive topic. For example, having participants complete sentence scramble tasks with words affiliated with different goals.
- Presenting false scientific “facts,” articles, or profiles of individuals or companies.
- Studies that activate stereotype threat.
- Experiments in which participants are told that two studies are unrelated when the first study is the manipulation, depending upon population and nature of manipulation.
Generally, research using the following deceptions will be reviewed by the full IRB:
- Any use of confederates in which the confederate engages in in-person dialog with a participant. For example, attempting to persuade a participant to make a certain decision or enter into a negotiation process.
- Studies in which participants are given false feedback about their own attributes, performance or abilities, for example, a manipulation in which students are told that their performance falls in the lowest quartile of Duke students following the completion of a task.
- Any study in which debriefing cannot be undertaken because to do so would cause more harm than good or when participants cannot be contacted, e.g. some types of Internet research.
- Any study involving subliminal priming.
- Covert observation and/or videotaping.
- Mood manipulations designed to induce feelings of guilt, sadness, depression.
- Any study in which participants are given false information about themselves in phase one of a study that is not corrected until a later session.
- Any study in which the researcher assumes a false identity.
- Manipulations designed to elicit behaviors about which participants’ may feel shame or other strong negative emotions.
The Ethics of Deception
Psychologists operate under rules that ensure they are taking into account ethical considerations. Because deception could cause harm to participants the use of deception in research is spelled out in their ethical guidelines. The APA ethics code states that a psychologist should not use deception unless the ends justify the means. Therefore, deception can be used if the outcome of the study outweighs the potential harm of deceptive tactics. It is difficult to make the argument the outcome of research is so valuable that it justifies the use of deception. IRBs, in particular, tend to fall on the more conservative side. No matter the outcome, deceptive research is no longer allowed when similar results can be found without deception or it “is reasonably expected to cause physical pain or severe emotional distress”. Further, if any deception is used, it must be revealed as soon as feasibly possible in the experimental process.
What is Deception?
All deception in research falls under two types: direct or indirect.
Direct
Direct deception is when participants are deliberately provided with misinformation about an experiment, including false instructions, staged situations, intentionally misleading feedback, or the use of exaggerations and minimizations.
Indirect
Indirect deception occurs when participants agree to postpone full disclosure of the true purpose of the research or when the goals of the study are not conveyed to the participant to mislead them. Think of it as lying by omission.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Deception
These are the pros and cons of using deception in research:
Advantages
- Deception allows researchers to obtain information they would normally be unable to find in a natural setting. For example, an experiment could create an “emergency” situation using confederates that allows researchers to measure people’s reactions to that certain circumstance.
- Deception in research provides the opportunity for real reactions to be measured. If people are unaware of the goals of a study you are more likely to get an authentic response from participants, rather than subjects reacting how they believe they are supposed to behave.
Disadvantages
- Deception can lead to suspicion among participants, causing them to behave in a way that they normally would not.
- Deception takes advantage of the trust of participants and creates a bad reputation for psychological research. As a result, it can leave the subject pool biased by making it less likely that certain people will want to participate.
- It can be argued that a participant, in order to give informed consent, must know the true objectives of a research study. It is a matter of maintaining experimental integrity. For these reasons, some may argue that any deception is unethical.
Five Examples of Deception in Psychological Research
Here are five of the most famous examples of deception used in experiments:
Milgram’s Obedience Experiment (1963)
Probably the most well-known experiment involving deception, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to measured an individual’s obedience to instructions from an authority figure. Participants were asked to deliver electric shocks to people they thought were fellow research subjects (they were really confederates). Of course, having participants falsely believe they were inflicting pain on others is a major form of deception and would not be allowed today. Even for the time, it was ethically questionable. However, its findings lent an understanding as to the reason why Germans committed the atrocities of WWII.
The Robbers Cave Experiment (1954)
The goal of Muzafer Sherif’s experiment was to see how a group of fifth-grade boys handled intergroup conflict. Sherif and his team brought two groups of boys to a summer camp setting and then proceeded to introduce variables to pit the two groups against each other before attempting to bring them together with a task in which they were forced to work together. The whole experiment was deceptive; the boys believed they were attending summer camp, not participating in a social experiment on group dynamics. To begin with, trying to invite conflict between unknowing groups of people is of questionable ethics. The fact that the subjects were fifth graders makes it even more controversial. Although the experiment exhibited the power of inter-group social dynamics, its manipulation of children lent ammunition to critics of the use of deception.
Brown Eyes vs. Blue Eyes Experiment (1968)
Jane Elliot was not a psychologist. She was a third-grade teacher in rural Iowa. In the aftermath of the Martin Luther King assassination, she wanted to teach her students what discrimination felt like. So, unbeknownst to her students, she performed an experiment. She told them that their eye color determined if one was better than the other. On the first day, blue-eyed children were told they were smarter, cleaner, and nicer. She then proceeded to treat the blue-eyed children better than the brown-eyed kids. The next day she reversed the experiment. What she found was that the children’s emotions and behavior reflected their status within the classroom. Although this was a valuable result, such manipulation of a third grader’s feelings would not be allowed today.
Bystander Effect Experiment (1968)
In the aftermath of the Kitty Genovese killing, there arose considerable interest in the social construct of bystander apathy. Psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley wanted to find out more about why people did not call for help when someone else was experiencing an emergency. They created an experiment where they made participants believe that someone in the next room was having an epileptic fit to gauge their response. They found that people are much more likely to respond when they were alone compared to when other people are around. This introduced the concept of “diffusion of responsibility”. Although this was an important concept in social psychology, the distress it may have caused participants would make it untenable today.
The Asch Conformity Experiment (1951)
The Asch experiment is a good example of the use of deception where the harm experienced by the participants was minimal. Solomon Asch wanted to study how group social pressure affected conformity. He asked people to match the length of line segments with others of a similar size. Subjects were almost 100 percent accurate when matching the length of the line alone. He then had confederates disagree with the participants’ judgments. He found that approximately one-third of subjects then said they agreed with confederates even though the confederates were wrong, thus exhibiting the impact of social pressure. Although deception was used in this experiment, the value of the conclusions appears to outweigh the level of harm experienced by participants.
The Psychological Impact of Deception
Speaking of harm, what is the impact of deception? As we have already discussed, it may dissuade people from participating in psychological research and suspicion may invalidate results. But, does it actually hurt people? Experiments such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where subjects were withheld treatment that could have saved their lives, are a remnant of the early 20th century and do not apply to current studies.
Like almost any issue, there is more than one opinion. There is some evidence that points to deception causing resentment and other negative emotions. Michael Cheng-TekTai argues that deception in research is never ethical and should not be permitted
However, Allan Kimmel notes that some studies have shown that people who participate in deception experiments “report having enjoyed deception experiments more and receiving more educational benefit from them”. Other researchers conclude that minimal types of deception, such as false feedback or masking the hypothesis of a study, cause little psychological harm to participants.
Future Use of Deception
Deceptive research in psychology has decreased since the 20th century but it has not entirely disappeared. The ethical guidelines surrounding its use are relatively strict and have been effective in reducing risk to participants. It has been noted that a basic debriefing procedure is likely effective in counteracting the consequences of deception as currently used. Because of its advantages and minimal risk, deception will continue to be used for scientific gain.
M.S. Broudy
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Psychology | St. Johns University
Master of Arts (M.A.), Social Psychology | American University
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), English; Psychology | Washington University in St. Louis
November 2019
More Articles of Interest: