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Deception in Psychological Research

When is its Use Justified?

Texas A&M University

Deception has been attacked repeatedly as ethically unacceptable and morally reprehensible. However, research has revealed that subjects who have participated in deception experiments versus nondeception experiments enjoyed the experience more, received more educational benefit from it, and did not mind being deceived or having their privacy invaded. Such evidence suggests that deception, although unethical from a moral point of view, is not considered to be aversive, undesirable, or an unacceptable methodology from the research participant's point of view. The repeated assumption of the unacceptability of deception seems to be due to the fact that deception has been evaluated only from the viewpoint of moral philosophizing. This has led to the repeated conclusion that deception is reprehensible and seems to have created a perceptual set to view deception immediately as aversive. However, the perception of the unethical nature of deception seems to be minimal in studies that investigate innocuous public behaviors and enhanced in studies that run the risk of harming research participants or in studies that investigate private behaviors. When this knowledge is combined with the fact that research participants do not mind being deceived, and that it can also be viewed as immoral not to conduct research on important problems, the scale seems to be tilted in favor of continuing the use of deception in psychological research.

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