Generally, in research, it is best to avoid deception. However, there are genuinely some cases where research would be difficult or impossible without some aspect of deception. For instance, how could you research whether people can tell the difference between dog food and pâté (ungated earlier version here), or between bottled water and tap water, if you couldn't do a blind taste test (which necessarily involves some deception). Similarly, in some research I conducted last year (which I will blog about in the future), we had alcohol delivered from a number of different delivery firms, to see which ones (if any) would ask for ID when the alcohol was delivered. [*]
Clearly, the extent of deception can vary from the relatively benign to the seriously problematic. However, in order to avoid seriously problematic cases of deception, is it necessary to have effective prohibition on deception in research? That is essentially the question discussed in this 2019 article by David Just (Cornell University), published in the journal Food Policy (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online). Just focuses on experimental economics, where:
The earliest published books on experimental economic methodology each give strong warnings to those entering the field that they must never use deception in a laboratory experiment...
Why is this effective prohibition in place? Just notes that:
The rationale for the prohibition on deception generally invokes both reputation effects and public goods. If subjects have participated in experiments in which they are deceived, they may be likely to anticipate deception in the next economic experiment they participate in, potentially changing their behavior. Moreover, if economic experimentalists generally gain a reputation for engaging in deception (perhaps if some economic experiments that engage in deception become well known) then the general pool of subjects may fail to respond to incentives as they normally would because of the potential for deception. Thus, researchers engaging in deception for their own benefit from a novel publication potentially have a negative impact on all other researchers in the field by exhausting the finite resource of trust on the part of participants for the researcher.
However, Just also notes that there are problems with this argument. First, it is not evidence-based, which is kind of ironic:
Experimental economics was created specifically to bring internally valid evidence to bare on theories of economic behavior. It is perhaps the height of irony that the prohibition on deception at once is based primarily on untested theories of behavior...
Second, since psychologists already employ deception in experiments, and generally draw from the same pool of (typically undergraduate student) subjects, then the pool of subjects is already tainted by deception. On this point, Just says that:
...I worry that the distinction between economic and psychological experiments (where deception is permitted) is only salient in the minds of economists and not experimental subjects. Notably experimental laboratories in both fields draw subjects from both the student population and the general population. Unless these participants distinguish between behavioral experiments conducted by psychologists and those conducted by economists our prohibition on deception is useless.
In other words, neither the reputation effects nor the public goods effects are strong enough arguments against deception in experimental economics. That isn't to say that it should be open season for deceptive experiments. However, the effective prohibition on deception is something that should be seriously reconsidered.
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[*] In the case of the alcohol delivery research, I wasn't fully convinced that we were being deceptive, as we were making genuine purchases in exactly the same way that other customers did. The only difference was that we were going to drink the alcohol after the purchase. Anyway, the University's Ethics Committee disagreed, so I guess it was deceptive at some level.
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