The lighter side of deception research in the social sciences: social work as comedy.

Subjects who are aware of research conditions including the relationships set up for testing may confirm the experimenter's expectations. They may also fulfill their own goals. Participant biases become most problematic when research outcomes are measured by subjective reports. Even nonverbal behaviors as in hypnosis research and many experimental assessments of social services are also amenable to distortion through the demands of the research situation including the researcher's subtle cues. In fact, the deception of subjects is a necessary precaution against participant bias, variously referred to as demand characteristics (Orne, 1962), interpersonal expectancy effects (Rosenthal and Rubin, 1978), confirmatory bias (Mahoney, 1977), and confirmational response bias (Epstein, 1990). Moreover, varying degrees of deception are routine in social science research (Lenza, 2004). Research that discloses its specific intentions to subjects by failing to implement appropriate deception also fails the test of scientific rigor.Precisely because of a routine failure to deceive subjects, the authority of research in psychotherapy, social work, counseling, public administration, management, corrections and so forth is compromised. There are few if any scientifically credible experimental assessments in these fields that testify to the effectiveness of interventions (Epstein, 1993; Epstein [unpublished]). Quite notably, experimental evidence of psychotherapy's effectiveness is undercut by reliance on the self-reports of patients in situations that coax them to affirm the healing touch of their therapists. Fields that insist on full disclosure and moralize about researchers and research that employ deception probably deceive themselves that their exaggerated application of informed consent is instituted to protect subjects rather than to protect their own organizational, institutional, and professional stakes.Yet although deception is a necessary condition of social science research that draws data from human subjects, it is not a sufficient condition. The canons of science also require valid and reliable measures, appropriate controls, protection of subjects implying a judicious informed consent when there is a palpable risk, and so forth. Meticulous methodologies applied without deception as protection against researcher bias are seriously flawed.The most basic and obvious protection against undue researcher influence is to turn over the conduct of an experiment to neutral technicians. This option has been institutionally rejected. Psychotherapists conduct research into psychotherapy; social workers into social work services; educators into education, and so forth. National grant systems are even organized along sectarian lines. The National Institute of Mental Health is dominated by clinicians and serves as a model of guild self-protectiveness. Not surprisingly, its funded research is routinely biased, providing evidence of effectiveness that is convincing only to the true believers who have substituted the psychotherapeutic religion of self-fulfillment for more mundane god-centered sectarian practices.Nevertheless, deception in social science research is often unconscionable. Some of the most prominent examples have crossed the line of safety and probity, exposing subjects to considerable risk or to large involuntary costs. Laud Humphreys (1970) has been generally defended by sociologists (Lenza, 2004; Hollister, 2004; Irving, 2004; Tewksbury, 2004; Nardi, 2004). He studied "tea rooms" in public places where homosexuals go for anonymous sex, by observing the pantomimes of engagement in public restrooms, then following them back to their cars, recording their license plate numbers, and identifying them through "license registers" (Humphreys, 1970, p. 38). Humphreys subsequently included their names in a local public health survey that provided cover for him and one "trusted mature graduate student" to interview them about their social attitudes (Humphreys, 1970, p. …