You may not be able to control participants’ attitudes, but given Adair’s (1973) claim that “the experimenter is half of this social interaction” and the experimenter’s “contribution to the data must be assessed or controlled” (p. 65), you can reduce the variability in your own behavior. You might consider tape-recording the instructions participants receive or at the very least reading the instructions from a prepared script and having a predetermined protocol for answering questions. In more extreme cases, you may need to resort to a single-blind or double-blind experiment (discussed later in the chapter).
Based on preexisting ideas of what is expected as a research participant and/or people’s general temperament, participants may want to see the researcher (and the research itself) succeed or fail. Adair (1973) provided useful categorizations (called role attitude cues) of these preexisting attitudes of participants, which vary from positive to moderately negative. The first attitude is the cooperative attitude (pp. 26–28); Adair states that those with cooperative attitudes will approach any experimental situation with that cooperative attitude “where there are no compelling cues to the contrary” (p. 26). To characterize this cooperative attitude, Adair cites the work of Martin Orne (1962), which showed the extent to which participants are willing to go to please the experimenter, including participating in a meaningless task for several hours. The second attitude that Adair presents is the defensive or apprehensive attitude (pp. 28–30). Participants with this attitude are often worried their abilities will be measured, given their cultural understanding of what it is that researchers do. Such concerns may lead to attempts to perform even better on the research tasks than otherwise would have been the case. The third role attitude is the negative attitude (pp. 30–32). Participants with this attitude may go out of their way to sabotage or otherwise act counter to what they perceive to be the purpose of the experiment. These participants may also simply answer as quickly as possible to exit the situation, taking less time on the research than careful attention would require. Adair cites research that has shown that participants who participate in research to meet a course requirement are more likely to have a negative attitude than are those who simply volunteer. The social skills of the researcher are important in working to create a positive research experience, whatever the participant’s initial motivation. “Subjects should not be treated as inert objects for study. Not only is their awareness of the experiment’s purposes a problem, but their attitudes, feelings, and motivations toward research must be considered” (Adair, 1973, p. 32).
Defensive or apprehensive attitude: Attitude of participant who is concerned about performance evaluation.
Negative attitude: Attitude of a participant who wants to undermine the research.
Single- and Double-Blind Approaches to Research
In Chapter 1, we talked in depth about the fact that people’s expectations or schemas shape their view of the world. The manner in which researchers approach their research can also shape outcomes. Remember the “Problems in Scientific Thinking” Michael Shermer (1997) listed, including “Theory influences observations” and “The observer changes the observed”? As researchers, we state hypotheses, which we hope will be supported. Our behavior can clearly shape research outcomes, and we must guard against that. Just think back to the selection of stimuli from Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1973), discussed in Chapter 1, in which the letter K led to support for their hypothesis about the availability heuristic, whereas other researchers have not verified that finding with different letters (Fiedler, 2011).
What steps can we take to make sure we do not influence research outcomes? Among the different approaches people have suggested are using a single-blind or a double-blind approach. In a single-blind approach, participants do not know their research condition. The use of a single-blind approach is common in research. It is the situation in which participants do not know whether they are being given the experimental treatment or a control (placebo). In a double-blind approach, neither participants nor researchers know to which condition the participants have been assigned. The double-blind approach is commonly employed in medical research because the outcomes are important and people’s beliefs (both those of the participants and the researchers) may influence the efficacy of the treatment.
Cover Stories
In a good deal of research, especially research in social psychology, the project would be undermined if participants knew the hypothesis of the study. In that situation, participants might purposely try to provide responses they thought supported or refuted the hypothesis. For that reason, researchers are often in the predicament of having to explain why they are asking participants to take part in the research, without “giving away” the real purpose. This situation leads to the need for a cover story, that is, a reasonable explanation for the purpose of research that does not reveal the hypothesis.
Cover story: Explanation about the purpose of research that hides the true nature of the study; used to reduce demand characteristics.
Passive deception: Form of deception that occurs through omission, rather than through commission; typically involves less than full explanation of the purposes of the research.
Active deception: Situation where there is commission as part of the research, either in the informed consent or in the research procedures themselves, that misleads, provides false feedback, or otherwise misrepresents the research.
Chapter 4 on ethical issues covers the difference between passive and active deception. In general, if you are not purposely misstating the reason for the research but are not fully explaining the reason, the approach is considered passive deception. If you are purposely misleading participants, this is one reason the research would be considered a case of active deception. As explained in Chapter 4 on ethics, the revised Common Rule requires prospective agreement from participants for such deception if the researcher wants to apply for an exemption from further IRB review. The nature and extent of the deception would determine the need for further IRB review. Frederick Gravetter and Lori-Ann Forzano (2016) provided a nice, simple way of describing the difference: Passive deception is like keeping a secret, and active deception is like telling a lie (p. 112).
In some situations, researchers simply say that the participants are going to take part in a study about attitudes and leave it at that (keeping a secret); this approach is sometimes called incomplete disclosure (see an overview put out by the University of California–Berkeley: http://cphs.berkeley.edu/deception.pdf). In other instances, there is no need for a cover story at all. If you were interested in the reactions people have to the design elements in their hospital room, for example, you might directly say that.
Figure 3.7 Single- Versus Double-Blind Designs
There are situations where you might need to have cover stories that involve active deception. Consider the following example. In a research project, the students were interested in what they called the difference between no violence and minor violence (pushing on someone else’s arm without much force). Following up on literature they had read about the weapon focus effect and eyewitness testimony (Loftus et al., 1987), the students were interested in whether witnessing minor violence would result in lower verbatim recall of a scripted conversation than would witnessing the same conversation without the minor violence.
To conduct the study (St. Pierre & Wong, 2003), the students enlisted