Examining Correlates of Research Participant’s Attitudes and Ethicality Ratings of Deception Studies

Abstract

<p>Deception is a key part of psychological research. In order to obtain accurate and representative responses from participants, deception is often the only method available to do so. This project aims to explore how attitudes about deception research and styles of ethical decision making are related to the perceived ethicality of deception studies. In other words, how do participants rate how ethical a certain study is, and what are the factors behind it? The participants in this study were presented with 12 vignettes of psychological experiments and were then asked to rate their level of ethicality as well as their willingness to participate in the experiment, on separate scales of 0-10. Proposed data analysis will use the concepts of idealism and relativism to explore how each influences the participants’ responses.</p>