Deception about study purpose does not affect participant behavior

Abstract

The use of deception in research is divisive along disciplinary lines. Whereas psychologists argue that deception may be necessary to obtain unbiased measures, economists hold that deception can generate suspicion of researchers, invalidating measures and ‘poisoning’ the participant pool for others. However, experimental studies on the effects of deception, notably false-purpose deception—the most common form of experimental deception—are scarce. Challenges with participant attrition and avoiding confounds with a form of deception in which two related studies are presented as unrelated likely explain this scarcity. Here, we avoid these issues, testing within an experiment to what extent false-purpose deception affects honesty. We deploy two commonly used incentivized measures of honesty and unethical behavior: coin-flip and die-roll tasks. Across two pre-registered studies with over 2000 crowdsourced participants, we found that false-purpose deception did not affect honesty in either task, even when we deliberately provoked suspicion of deception. Past experience of deception also had no bearing on honesty. However, incentivized measures of norms indicated that many participants had reservations about researcher use of false-purpose deception in general—often considered the least concerning form of deception. Together, these findings suggest that while false-purpose deception is not fundamentally problematic in the context of measuring honesty, it should only be used as a method of last resort. Our results motivate further experimental research to study the causal effects of other forms of deception, and other potential spillovers.

Communication networks and team performance: selecting members to network positions

“…However, on average, attrition rates were not affected by deception. At the same time, Rahwan et al (2022) found that deceiving participants about the study’s purpose did not significantly alter their behavior. Thus, while the negative effect of deception may vary depending on its nature and the participant behaviors of interest, we nonetheless strongly recommend future researchers carefully weigh the implications of deception, consider norms about deception for their field, and thoroughly assess its necessity for their research questions.…”

Investigating the effects of social information on spite in an online game

“…We did this to avoid recruiting two participants but only using the data from one (the decider). While there is evidence that deception does not appear to influence participants’ responses in experiments (Rahwan et al, 2022 ), deceiving participants risks eroding trust in experimental instructions (Charness et al, 2022 ). We suggest that our use of deception is unlikely to have biased our results (as we included delays to simulate a real two-player interaction) but agree that deception should not be widely used (Charness et al, 2022 ) and will avoid deception in any future studies.…”

Informed Consent and Debriefing When Deceiving Participants: A Systematic Review of Research Ethics Guidelines

“…It has also been debated whether there may be methodological risks for future deception studies due to participants biasing their study behavior after a previous debriefing (Bonetti, 1998;Hertwig & Ortmann, 2008). However, most recent empirical studies have not found evidence of such effects (Barrera & Simpson, 2012;Jamison et al, 2008;Krasnow et al, 2020;Rahwan et al, 2022;Takeuchi et al, 2013). A second condition referred to the risk of harm to participants as a consequence of the debriefing.…”