reaction he did which was “where the fuck does this kid get off?” He also blamed me for entering research with a bias. I was taken aback at his reactions, and recorded mine in my reflexivity journal: He believed my letter seeking permission to contact his participants referred to his work as unethical and that it states a preconceived notion of my results and people’s reactions. I hope I can mend this relationship so that I can get some participants. Otherwise, finishing my thesis does not look like a promising prospect. The relationship was not mended, but I was able to find participants without his help. I did learn that wording and language is instrumental in guiding research. From that point on, I began to refer to participants’ roles as having “potentially caused participants harm or distress.” This change was officially made in an addendum to the poster and any other relevant materials. Results The analysis of the transcribed interviews revealed that being a research confederate had both positive and negative aspects. As illustrated in Figure 1, participants’ overall attitude toward being as a research confederate can be conceptualized as a resulting value on a scale after the positive aspects of their experiences have placed on one side of the scale and the negative aspects on the other. On the one hand, these research confederates experienced a number of Negative Feelings as a result of the Challenges (e.g., performing their role, acting negatively toward participants) and Concerns (regarding the experiment and the participants) they encountered. On the other hand, these negative feelings were often counterbalanced by confederates’ Belief in the Necessity of the Methods used in the study (e.g., the use of deception; regarding the ends as justifying the means), the way in which their Faith in the
...[staring at the participant] would cause the person anxiety. It’s just with me always being the person it just kept it consistent, because if you had two really high anxious people, they’d both be laughing or whatever. Um, so yeah, I found excuses why not to feel bad. Excuses helped Sarah Smith feel better about increasing anxiety levels in already socially anxious participants. Her excuses included recalling that participants entered the laboratory with preexisting anxiety. This helped her feel less responsible for their anxiety, resulting in less negative feelings for her. She explained this saying, “They’re naturally anxious people. We knew that with them coming in, uh, so that would help, kind of taking the blame off of me and put it on the situation.” Pants had been involved in negotiating with participants. Her role required her to respond either happily or angrily towards participants’ offers during negotiations. Pants described how she deliberately ignored the participants’ reactions because their reactions made it difficult for her to perform her role: …sometimes during the study [participants would] be like, ‘okay, relax, like, it’s just an experiment. And then you’d be like ‘whatever!’ or ‘you suck’ [sarcastically] or whatever. I’d have to kind of brush it off and still not laugh at myself because it was absurd what I was doing. Sometimes Pants felt that her responses were unjustified given the offers participants were giving during negotiations. This led to Pants’ need to ignore participants’ reactions while trying to enact her role. Jake talked about a poor initial experience that made him decide to meet with participants: I felt really bad about that first experience. So, needless to say, for the next little while, I was very, um, very nervous about doing the study. Um, I didn’t really want to do it, but I knew I had to be very careful. And I decided then,