Designing Studies that use Deception

Designing Studies with Deception

You learned that deception automatically places participants at risk and, therefore, researchers must ethically justify deception. Furthermore, researchers who employ deception have the responsibility to debrief participants fully following the study and to do so in a manner that decreases the discomfort, embarrassment, or potential harm that the deception might create.

In the following situations, you are asked to design a deception that would be effective. Furthermore, you are to ethically justify the use of deception by showing that non-deceptive approaches would be ineffective and that the impact of the deception is likely to be mild or can be minimized with proper debriefing. If you cannot justify deception, and sometimes you can't, you should not be using it.

You want to study the effect of self-consciousness on negotiation patterns. You ask two people to negotiate as if they were trying to agree on the purchase of a used car (one is the owner and the other the potential buyer). Your plan is to manipulate the level of self-consciousness by asking the parties to disclose varying amounts of personal information just prior to the beginning of the negotiation.
You want to run the same study, but your plan this time is to manipulate the degree of self-consciousness by either including or not including a large mirror on one of the walls of the research room.
You want to see how much of the effect of stimulant drugs for treating hyperactivity is due to expectancy effects. You plan to give all of your hyperactive children the stimulant drugs, but you will be telling both the children and the teachers for half of the group that the children are receiving placebo drugs. You will be measuring the level of activity, the degree of disruptive behavior, and teacher's rating of both of those variables.
You are interested in how issues of identity affect one's feeling about other people. Rather than asking people about their identity issues, you decide it would be better to try to manipulate this variable. Your plan is to give people a complex psychological test and vary the feedback that you give people about the results. For half of the people, you note that the test suggests that the person is unsure about who they are and even unsure about their sexual orientation. The other half are told that the test suggests that the person is functioning well and has a good sense of themselves. After receiving that feedback, you ask the participants to judge people they see on videotape on several dimensions.
You are interested in seeing how failure on one task affects a person's performance on other tasks. However, you want to be able to control who succeeds and who fails. You have your participants engage in a computer videogame-like task that you tell them measures their ability to integrate information quickly and effectively. In fact, the videogame is rigged so that some players appear to guess right most of the time and others appear to guess wrong. Presumably, those who consistently guess wrong will feel like they failed, whereas those who guessed right will feel as if they succeeded. You then test them on a task of verbal comprehension.