Читать книгу Introduction to Abnormal Child and Adolescent Psychology - Robert Weis - Страница 144

Deception occurs when researchers deliberately provide false or incomplete information to participants in order to mislead them. According to the APA Ethics Code, researchers must not deceive participants unless the deception is justified by the study’s significant scientific value and other, nondeceptive techniques are not feasible (American Psychological Association, 2017a).

For example, Seymour, Macatee, and Chronis-Tuscano (2018) wanted to know if children with ADHD are less able to tolerate frustration than their peers without ADHD. They asked children with and without ADHD to play a computer game in which they must trace a figure using a computer mouse. To elicit frustration, the researchers rigged the game: they programmed the mouse to occasionally move the cursor in the opposite direction, causing children to make mistakes. The researchers found that children with ADHD quit the task much sooner than their peers without ADHD. The researchers were allowed to deceive participants because the benefits of the study outweighed the temporary frustration experienced by the children and there was no way to conduct the study without deception.