For this reason, deception can only be used in certain circumstances. The conditions for those circumstances are that a no other nondeceptive method exists to study the phenomenon of interest, 2 the study possesses significant contributions, and 3 the deception is not expected to cause significant harm or severe emotional distress. Whenever deception is used, it is the responsibility of the experimenter to fully debrief the participants at the end of the study by explaining the deception, including the reasons it was necessary and ensuring that participants are not emotionally harmed.
In certain cases, debriefing participants can actually increase the harm of deception by making participants feel tricked by pointing out perceived flaws. However, a thorough debriefing that alleviates distress and explains the deception is usually sufficient.
Human subjects committees or Institutional Review Boards, which include researchers and lawyers that review and approve research at an institution, must approve the use of deception to certify that it is both necessary and that a plan exists to debrief participants to remove and residual effects of the deception.
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.
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. In the aftermath of the Kitty Genovese killing, there arose considerable interest in the social construct of bystander apathy. 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. Although this was an important concept in social psychology, the distress it may have caused participants would make it untenable today. 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 percent accurate when matching the length of the line alone. 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. 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. Depending on the details of the study and the level of risk, an immediate in-person debriefing may be necessary to minimize risk, even if it jeopardizes future enrollment.
There are certain circumstances under which the IRB may waive the requirement for debriefing when a study involves deception, such as when the debriefing regarding deception may cause more harm than the deception itself. Research involving deception could fall into any of the three review levels exempt, expedited, or full board depending on the specifics of the study. Our research actually focuses on the development of "status hierarchies" in small groups.
In many small groups such as project teams, ad hoc committees, or juries, some people tend to "take charge" more than others. However, the process by which these small group hierarchies develop is not well understood. In this study, we are attempting to understand what happens when two members of a group disagree as to who should take charge.
To try and obtain unbiased or natural reactions, we had to give you some false information at the beginning of the study. We informed you that, based on your scores on the tests from the prescreening packet, we had determined that you were the most suited to lead the group in the group task, and we told you that you were the only member in the group who received this information.
But in fact, we gave this same information to one other group member, i. Thus, each of you was under the impression that you were uniquely suited to lead the group.
This was necessary for us to better understand how status disagreements proceed and how they are resolved. By telling two of you that you were each best suited to lead the group, it was much more likely that a status disagreement would emerge.
Without telling two of you, it was more likely that only one person would attempt to "take charge," and thus no status disagreement would occur.
We apologize for misleading you, but we believe this was the only way to examine the processes that are the object of our research. In designing this study, we took care to minimize any possible risks or discomforts that might be related to the deception.
Now that you understand the true nature of our study, you have the chance to refuse the use of the data we collected from you for research purposes. You are free to ask us not to use your data in our study analysis. This is entirely voluntary, but we hope to analyze as much data as possible to better understand the processes by which status hierarchies develop in groups. Because this experiment is ongoing, we request that you not share the true nature and purpose of this experiment with others who might potentially participate in our study.
Research using intentional deception. American Psychologist ; — Skip to main content. Toggle menu Go to search page. Search Field. Contact iRIS Training. Research involving Deception. Guidance on Use of Deception and Incomplete Disclosure in Research The purpose of this document is to assist researchers in addressing issues related to using deception in research with human subjects [1]. Overview Deception is when a researcher gives false information to subjects or intentionally misleads them about some key aspect of the research.
Examples of Deception : Subjects complete a quiz, and are falsely told that they did very poorly, regardless of their actual performance.
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