There’s a Problem With Deception in Psychology

You may be familiar with some of psychology’s most famous experiments involving what seem to follow questionable ethics by today's standards. The set of studies on obedience to authority conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram provides a prime example. As you may recall, participants believed that they were acting in accordance with the demands of the experimenter to administer a real, potentially life-threatening electric shock to real-life people who couldn’t seem to succeed at a memory task. There was no actual electric shock, nor were there actual other participants, so no one was really harmed. However, even learning later about the experimental deception could have long-lasting consequences for those who thought they were enacting cruel and almost inhumane punishment.

Ten years ago, the British Psychological Society published a highly critical analysis of the use of deception in the research of Milgram and others. Even at the time of the Milgram publications in the 1950s, fellow social psychologists, including my undergraduate advisor W. Edgar Vinacke, "took issue with the fact that participants were exposed to ‘painful, embarrassing, or worse, experiences.’"

The logic used to defend deception, as stated by the paper’s author, Allan Kimmel, is that it "is a necessary evil, often required to provide the necessary ‘technical illusions’ and increase the impact of a laboratory or field setting, such that the experimental situation becomes more realistic and reduces the effects of participants’ motives and role-playing behaviour."

What do you think about this? Milgram’s studies and others in a similar vein indeed provided valuable, if not disturbing, information about human behavior. Such justification is used to support the “benefits” vs. “risks” of deception research. However, could there be a better way to dig into the depths of human nature in a way that could avoid any risks to participants?

Deception and the Ethics Codes of Psychological Research

Although Milgram’s work is perhaps one of the most extreme examples of deception in social psychology, there are countless other experiments still going on today that keep participants in the dark about the true nature of the study for which they’re providing data.

In a comprehensive review of studies using deception, University of Koblenz-Landau psychologist Benjamin Hilbig and colleagues (2021) examined the extent to which one of the hallmark features of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Ethics Code, namely "spelling out the conditions in which deception may be justifiable," is upheld in social psychological research involving deception.

The specific focus of the German research team’s analysis was on deception as “commission,” not “omission.” In other words, in deception as commission, experimenters mislead participants rather than more innocuously leaving out information about a study’s true purpose. There are two key features of the APA Ethics Code that Hilbig et al. used as their criterion: (1) the significance of the study in terms of its "prospective scientific, educational, or applied value," and (2) "effective nondeceptive alternative procedures are not feasible.” The two keywords here are “significant” and “alternative.”

As Hilbig and his collaborators pointed out, the notion of “significant” carries with it considerable subjectivity in this context as no number can be attached to it. Significance doesn’t stand on its own in the ethical criteria for deception, though. Considering that the next criterion of whether an alternative is available is also necessary because even if everyone could agree on what constitutes a study significant enough to warrant deception, it would beg the question of whether there’s another way to get to the same empirical problem. If so, then there wouldn’t be a need for deception, no matter how important the study’s findings potentially are.

At this point, you might be thinking that since psychological research must pass muster by the institutional review board of an investigator’s institution, both criteria by definition must be met before a single participant enters the lab, virtual or otherwise. Additionally, research appears in journals only if the next set of eyes, namely peer reviewers and journal editors, agree that the study is worth publishing.

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How Often Is Deception Used in Psychology, and Why?

As it turns out, deception is remarkably widespread in psychological research, amounting to, as the German authors observed from previous studies, a prevalence of 80 percent. The fact that it is so prevalent, however, doesn’t provide “much help to answer the fundamental question of whether psychologists, as a group, actually abide by their own rules.”

Do they truly go to the effort necessary to develop designs that could help them avoid deception? Review boards and peer reviewers would be less likely to consider this criterion than the significance criterion. They indeed may not even be asked to entertain as a possibility that alternative approaches are available.

To answer this question of alternatives empirically, the U. Koblenz-Landau research team dug into a trove of 120 published studies either obtained as stand-alone articles or as part of previously-published meta (large scale) analyses in which deception was used to hone in on the two behaviors of cheating and prosocial behavior.

Consider cheating. In a study involving deception, participants believed they were interacting with a real person but were instead paired up against a pre-set computerized program that presented them with an opportunity to lie but not get caught.

In a study of prosocial behavior, similarly, a person had an opportunity to act cooperatively or competitively with a simulated person or a person acting in accordance with the experimenter's instructions.

Put yourself in the place of a participant in one of the most well-known approaches used to study altruism. You're in a lab and hear the sound of a person in a hallway who's apparently fallen and is asking for help. Do you rush out to help or keep working away at the "experiment" you thought was the real purpose of the study? What if you don't help and then find out in the "debriefing" phase of the study that it was a put-up job? Now wouldn't you feel worse for not behaving in a prosocial manner and offering to help?

Turning back to the German article, the authors found that of the 120 separate studies, only 17 provided a justification for the use of deception, such as “In order to increase the authenticity of the experiment, participants were told to play games online with students in the adjacent room,” or “to facilitate belief of interaction with a real person.” These justifications hardly speak to the availability of alternatives but instead—as the authors point out—provide only the briefest of justifications.

If an alternative to deception were available, though, wouldn’t you think that a researcher would prefer this, particularly given that this is a requirement of the ethics code? The reason, Hilbig et al. pointed out, is that it’s too expensive. It’s much more practical to design an experiment in which the participant’s “partner” behaves according to a set of pre-determined criteria rather than hoping that a partner will engage in the desired behavior of cheating. Indeed, if the behavior in question is very rare, the researchers would have to go through a large number of potential partners to find one to respond in the desired fashion.

What Does This Mean for the Consumer of Research on Psychology?

If you are the type of individual who enjoys reading about psychology (a reasonable assumption!), then the German study’s results are chilling indeed. The authors pointed out that their findings don’t apply to psychology in general but instead to these particular subfields within social psychology. However, if journals in the behavioral sciences continue to publish these studies as part of their larger coverage of the field or science in general, then what the authors call the “bad apples” they’ve identified in their work should be of concern.

Furthermore, returning to an argument brought out in the British journal, there’s reason to worry about the lessons learned by students in psychology who are exposed to these deceptive methods. The deceived participants may go on to wonder if any of psychology can be trusted, and the student learning the ropes may figure that time and money justify skimping on the side of ethical considerations for deception.

You may have to serve as your judge of a study’s merits for the time being. Hilbig and his collaborators lay the onus squarely in the laps of journal reviewers and editors, who they hoped will “pay more than lip service” to the calls for reform in the use of deception. They can do this by having authors sign a statement attesting to the strict adherence to the ethics code. If deception was a requirement of the research design, provide a detailed justification of why.

To sum up, there’s a great deal of value in learning about deception as it affects your own personal life. In addition, learning how the field can more responsibly deal with research on this fascinating topic can only add to that value.