Like many of my peers, I have participated in some experiments ran by McGill’s psychology department for extra credit or just as a favor to some friends involved in research labs. Social psychology experiments are, in my opinion, the most fun ones among all psychology studies, so naturally I’ve had the pleasure to experience quite a lot of them. One thing that I have noticed about these social psychology studies is that almost all test administrators explain to test subjects, before the experiments begin and in great detail, what the background and objectives of the study are. What’s interesting is the fact that this information is usually misleading or simply made up, just to test how the participants react in different situations.

A very famous example of such deception is the Milgram experiment in 1963. Participants are told the objective of the study is to examine learning and memory, but the true objective is to study the obedience of the participants to authority figures. During the experiment, an experimenter (the authority figure) orders the participants to give electric shocks to a student every time the student fails to memorize an item, with increasing intensity. The experimenter and the student are both actors, and the pained screams coming from the student are just tape recordings. The test participants don’t know this, and they get extremely stressed as they are urged by the experimenter to keep increasing the voltage. Many of these participants believe they could’ve seriously hurt the student by the end of the experiment, before they are told the truth. This experiment undoubtedly provoked ethical criticism for the stress inflicted upon the participants by such a traumatic experience.

The social psychology studies at McGill are certainly not that traumatic, but there is still a lot of deception involved. In one of the studies I have been in, the graduate students made the participants read a short journal article about why bilinguals have higher pain tolerance before we emerged our hands in icy water. This is to see how far we are willing to go to prove that we belong in a particular group (perceived as having a high social desirability). Not surprisingly, all of us tried to keep our hands in the water as long as possible despite the pain. We all felt a little silly when the grad students told us about the real objective of the study, but there was no harm done.

Personally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with intentionally misinforming test subjects. This is a great solution for minimizing bias in the subjects’ responses and behaviours. As long as the experiment complies with APA’s rules and regulations, and there is no lasting physical or mental harm inflicted, deception is just a practical method of testing as any others. In my example above, the grad students have also taken every step possible so that there are no ethical violates: they thoroughly explained the real objective and methods used to the participants before they let us sign consent forms and made sure that everyone was comfortable with their data and records being included in the experiment.