Deception in Psychological Research

According to Pierce (2008), deception in psychological research exists in a rather grey area of ethical practice in that is neither uncommon nor prohibited, yet it is strongly discouraged. But should it be? Does the use of deception in psychological research seriously violate ethical research practice, and if so, what are the boundaries within which such a violation may actually be acceptable given the benefits arising from the research? The purpose of this paper is to examine the ethics of the use of deception in psychological research. The paper first defines the terms 'ethics' and 'deception' and then moves on to discussion the impact of deception, especially as it relates to the costs-benefits ratio. The final section of the paper develops and presents conclusions based on the presented discussion and reviewed research.

Thiroux and Kraesmann (2008) define 'Ethics' as a field of study that concerns itself with the standards of right and wrong in human behavior. According to the authors, ethics is concerned with rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, and other specific values; as a field, it also seeks to provide consistent and well-founded reasons for any standards that are developed and used to impose reasonable obligations and constraints on people's freedom of behavior.

In psychological research, certain ethical standards are brought to bear on the use of deception, which Patry (2001) defines as the delibera

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little harm were a strong argument in favor of continuing to use deception in research. It should be noted that Christensen (1988) used a costs/benefits ratio to analyze whether deception should be used in at least some psychological research, which is to say that the costs of the research were evaluated or weighted by Christensen against the potential benefits that come about because of the research. This continues to be the view taken by most psychologists. For example, ten years after Christensen's argument, Arndt (1998) argued the same way, stating that deception was necessary in order to collect information on certain topics and that, moreover, most participants understand and accept that they may be deceive and are not much bothered by it. In effect, the benefits far outweigh the costs. Similar arguments were offered by Kimmel (1998), who did, however, note that it would be wise and "ethical" to evaluate the long-term effects of participating in psychological research that used deception as this was an area of the research that had not been well examined since most studies looked only at short-term effects on subjects. Researchers that are more current continue to make essentially the same arguments. For example, B

Category: Psychology - D