fraud IN PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Deception in psychological Research

Deception In Psychological Research

Introduction

There are a number of studies that have addressed the issue of research participants' reactions to deception experiments. Several of these studies consist of the self-reports of subjects following participation in a deception experiment. Milgram (1964), for example, found that only 1.3% of his subjects reported any negative feelings about their experiences within the experiment, and 84% were glad to have participated (Milgram, 1964). These findings were supported by Ring, Wallston, and Corey's (1970) conceptual replication of Milgram's study. These investigators found that only 4% of their subjects regretted participating in the experiment.

Clark and Ward (1974) found that 95% of the subjects participating in a "bystander intervention in an emergency" experiment reported considering the research valuable and 94% considered the deception unavoidable. Such results suggest that the deception employed in these studies did not have an adverse impact on the subjects' assessment of the experiment. However, the data obtained from these studies did not focus specifically on the impact of the deception, but rather on related issues, such as research participants' reaction to their experimental participation.

It is possible that the apparently favorable data obtained from such studies may have been affected by other aspects of the study, such as the fact that Milgram's subjects were overly acquiescent (Baumrind, 1964), or that their positive reaction was a result of dissonance reduction arising from the negative effects generated by the deception. In other words, the deception may have generated feelings of being used, duped, and so on. As a way of coping with such negative self-perceptions, the research participants may have reinterpreted the experiment as being valuable and interesting.

Berscheid, Baron, Dermer, and Libman (1973) provide evidence that seems to suggest that rival hypotheses, such as dissonance reduction, are not viable explanations for the failure to find adverse reactions from subjects experiencing deception. These investigators had subjects read and role-play a variety of experimental scenarios of published studies, some of which included deception. The subjects were asked to assess their reaction to the study they had role-played in terms of their willingness to participate and their evaluation of the experiment. The scenarios varied in terms of consequence to the subject (high or low), nature of the information they were given about the experiment, and type of debriefing given. The results of the study revealed no significant difference between subjects in the high- and low-consequence conditions. Because the low-consequence condition consisted of giving the subjects instructions communicating that their responses were largely academic and would most probably never have any real consequence for them, and all subjects were role-play subjects, the subjects should not have experienced the negative effects of having been deceived.

Milgram's Study of Obedience

The Milgram experiment on obedience to administration numbers was a sequence of communal psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which assessed the enthusiasm of study participants to obey an administration number who instructed them to present acts that conflicted with their individual ...