I have have never been the biggest fan of the idea of the ethical constraints that are placed on all psychological studies due to the limitations this places on discovering new effects and results, though I have always respected that they need to be in place to allow psychology as a field to progress overall (see an earlier blog for details on why I think this). But now I want to discuss deception of participants in particular and why I believe it is wrong to excessively lie to them and important to limit this wherever possible.
I think we can all agree that where ethics is concerned, a more lenient view is taken for deception than other things such as ‘harm to participants’ or maintaining integrity, but could we be leanient further without without causing problems for ourselves? When we lie to our participants, or even just omit certain infromation, it is done for good reason to get the best results, and the participants are told immediately after the study through a debrief, so no actual harm is done. At most, a participant might be annoyed about the deception but I believe that most people would appreciate that it needed (even if they did not like it), most psychology students accept that these deceptions are required and why should the general public be so different to us?
So it seems that maybe we should be even more lenient with the ethical consideration of deception since it is necessary in many studies and most psychology students I have talked to even expect a bit of information to be distorted or omitted. And therin lies the reason why we must not be more leanient with deception; because we have come to expect it. If the current level of deception has lead students to simply believe that they are being lied to then imagine how the public would behave if more of them saw it that way. They would be mistrustful of psychologists and even though we would not cause them actual harm, what does our word mean if they expect it to be a lie. We may lose many potential participants becasue of this, which is why we must keep deception to a minimum wherever possible, and try to find new and more inventive ways to get good data without lying to the people we actual want to help.
statisticalperrin 
Hi there, interesting blog!
I think what many people don’t realise when psychologists deceive participants, its not because they want to be cruel or to see the participants reactions, but because if they told the participant the aims of their study, then the participants are likely not to behave in the way they usually would. This is called demand characteristics, where the participants guess the aims of the study and what the researcher wants to achieve and gives it to them. So a researcher then may gain significant results when actually the results may be very different.
An example of a study where if the researcher had not deceived his participants, then it would be very unlikely that he would have gained similar results is Milgram’s study of obedience. If he had said at the beginning to participants, that in this study we are looking to see whether you will follow the researchers instructions and give electric shocks to a learner, then participants may not have followed the instruction. Many believe that Milgram’s study was unethical as it had deception, so it didn’t gain full-conformed consent and that it harmed the participants, the participants were under a lot of stress. However if we look into the efforts Milgram went into, you can see that this is not the case. Firstly Milgram got a group of psychologists and gained prior consent. This is where he asked a group of psychologist whether they would mind taking part in the study, and whether they thought it was ethical. Furthermore, participants were fully debriefed several times after the study, so even though Milgram had to lie in the beginning, the participants new the truth by the end of the study, and all were glad that they had taken part.
Here is a link which goes into more details about Milgrams study: http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/milgram.htm
Another point, which you could have mentioned, is the ethical principle integrity. This principle looks at research being accurate, honest, objective, reliable and truthful and that deception in research must be demonstrably necessary. So if in research, psychologists have looked at every possible way of conducting the study and they have to deceive participants because there is no way around it, then by looking at the ethical principles, it would seem to be ok!
Although I do understand your points about the public ‘expecting’ deception in research, and I do agree that this happens a lot, I cannot say that I think it is a necessarily good idea. I believe that the ethical guidelines have been put into place for good, valid reasons so therefore whenever possible they should be followed.
On the other hand, I agree with your points about research needing to deceive participants slightly in order to gain valid results and avoid confounding variables when possible. In these situations, researchers should run a cost-benefit analysis in order to weight up which solution would be best. Where researchers do need to deceive the participant, as long as a detailed debrief is given and counselling offered if necessary then this could be accepted, as long as the participant isn’t being put to any harm of course!
This is again is a sensitive area in research, where do we draw the line? When we hear the word deception we instantly think ‘no’ this is wrong, we are trained from birth what is right and wrong – and lying is wrong. But when it comes to research we make exceptions to this rule. If lying is for the greater good of the human race and the world, surely this can be accepted. Well yes it can and no it can’t. I honestly do not know where I stand on this argument.
Milgrams research has provided us with much insight into being human, and what we are capable of, and deception was central for gaining such insight. And in this case, I believe that the positives outweighed the negatives. I don’t believe that the participants suffered severely as a consequence. So deception in this case was acceptable. Although, this study did raise much alarm bells concerning ethics after.
Since Milgrams study, ethical concerns are of primary concern for all research, and we know that if such a study was attempted these days it would most definatley be rejected. Has this haltered are knowledge and how many missed opportunities have there been of such exceptional findings………we will never know, and what a shame that is.
I believe that we should be more lenient on the deception side of research, and accept that volunteers enter studies ‘at their own risk’, providing that the research has not got devastating effects on participants, and that any adverse effects are treated and dealt with in the short term future.
As you say, most of us expect a little deception when taking part in research, and this will sometimes have an impact on findings, we can not do anything to change this, we will always be wary of psychologists and research, but the key word here is a ‘little’, and I believe that this will also reflect in findings – ‘little’ impact.
All in all, I believe that deception is a necessary evil for the progress of science (within limits of course :-)).
like you i can see both sides of the argument. I can understand that deception is needed in almost every study to a certain extent and that much of what we have discovered so far would not have been possible without deception. Something so simple can affect the way a person behaves, for example telling someone an experiment is on reaction time may make them respond faster than they would in a normal circumstance. So surely leaving out a small detail won’t do any harm. However i feel that people who are constantly surrounded by psychology can understand and have far more appreciation for the need for deception,however people from the general public may be disheartened from participating in further studies.
I think psychology has to be careful and try not to deceive participants as we run the risk of people expecting to be deceived and act differently. A common question i have been asked by others is ” do you not constantly wonder or worry that your lecturers are doing some sort of experiment on you” this is worrying that the general public think that just being around psychologists means they are deceiving you in some way.
I think this is a difficult topic and i can appreciate both sides, however i feel that as long as participants are debriefed about the study at the end and the experimenter also explains why they did not tell them all of the information and how it could have affected the results or the way they would have responded i think people would have far more appreciation and understanding.
I like the view you took on this blog. I personally think that we should be allowed to lie to participants as much as we like as long as there’s ‘no harm done’!! Take Milgram’s study for example, (even though it’s deception to the extreme), how many of those participants would have had long lasting damage, really? I don’t think so, I would personally have loved to be part of that study!! They were deceived but it’s a study with findings that had such a big impact that we still talk about it today!! There’s no way that study could have worked without deception!! Also, it’s not like we kind of knew what the findings would be anyway, Psychiatrists and Psychologists basically predicted that no one would go to the end except maybe the occasional psycho, but over 60% of participants continued to the end!! how wrong were they? So it contributed a fair amount to our knowledge about the human race.. as far as I’m concerned the deception was completely justified!! The same experiment has been replicated by the likes of Derren Brown who found extremely similar results (I think there was a 4% difference). Just because he isn’t a chartered psychologist, people open their mouths in amazement when he does it but Milgram was kicked out of the BPS. I think if people are amazed by something that doesn’t hurt anyone then the amount of deception is actually ok. I think deception as an ethical guideline can definitely be more lenient.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that when a research omits information from the study that they are deceiving them. I also believe that, if the public knew more information about why the studies would be much more limited to their range of research if they had to inform participants of every single detail of the study, then the results produced might not be valid.
Didn’t mean to post that yet, opps.
What I was trying to get at is that if the public knew that the results might not be true or valid without this research deception, then I believe that far more would understand that it is needed for valid research.
Hi, i thought this was a good blog, you obviously have strong views on this subject and get them across extremely well. i agree with you that ethical guidelines are defiantly needed for the overall good of the field however by saying deception should be kept to the minimum could actually result in the opposite effect. if we have a look at some previous experiments such as Milgram (1963) or Ashe (1951) in both these experiments deception was central to the overall success of the study, i realise that back in those days guidelines werent so strict but still they provided us with huge advances within psychology and with the minimization of deception these experiments would not go ahead and psychology may not be where it is today.
As psud78 says, it is a certain type of person who signs up to experiments. Whether it is a psychology undergraduate attempting to full-fill their SONA credits or an average Joe who just wants to earn a few bob, these people are putting themselves forward. In essence all participants are volunteers as we live in a society where we cannot be forced to do something against our own free will (in theory anyway) so anyone who takes part in a study is a volunteer. The volunteer will therefore be less likely to mind if they are deceived as they know that what they are taking part in is science and not real life. Mild deception is a tool used in all forms of life and is not a huge problem. Okay, if someone walks out of an experiment thinking they have just killed someone then this is a little too far, but not telling someone that the coffee they are drinking is decaf instead of regular is no crime. The person signed up to the study, so they must know what science can involve. And science uses deception as a tool. The greatest psychological findings ever would not have been found without some levels of deception. (http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/conscience.html)
Although I believe that in theory you give a good argument here. If we lied to everyone then no one would trust psychologists; they would always believe that we are lying. However, the general public is such a large population; I doubt that lying to every participant who has ever undertaken a psychological study would actually make a difference. Many people go through life without ever being part of an experiment, and the ones who do take part are in a minority, and would probably not care too much about it to speak about it in great detail with their friends. So the word of mouth about psychologists being liars would probably never take flight!
I do agree though, that when people suspect that someone is lying, their behaviour and reactions change. Being a Psychology student, and having taken part in University experiments, I often suspect the researcher of lying; Even if at the end I find out they are not. I believe that my reactions etc changes depending on my thoughts on the experiment. I do try to be impartial, but find this impossible. Students are used a lot in experiments, and account for the largest proportion of participants in research in general. The researchers know that we as students have some ‘inside knowledge’ on the experimental processes, however they still use students. This therefore shows that misleading participants in the form of lying, is justified and has no significant difference to the actual results, so I do not see lying a s a problem.