Truthfulness as the basis for ethical safeguards in deceptive research: An interview study with researchers

ABSTRACT

Ethical safeguards such as debriefing are often recommended or required for research studies in which participants are deceived. However, existing guidance on these safeguards seems insufficiently coherent and precise, which may be associated with their suboptimal implementation in practice. This study aimed to contribute to a more coherent and precise framework of ethical safeguards in deceptive studies through semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of 24 researchers who had significant experience with deception. Interviewees discussed which ethical safeguards they implemented and how, as well as their relation to the notion of truthfulness (i.e., the intentional communication of true information). Moreover, interviewees provided a variety of reasons for and against implementing these safeguards, as well as how these reasons varied with the particular context of a study. Overall, the current study contributes to a more coherent and precise understanding of ethical safeguards in deceptive research that could be useful for guiding researchers and ethics reviewers in their ethical decision-making, although certain imprecisions and incoherent aspects remain in need of further investigation and normative reflection.

KEYWORDS:

• Deception
• ethical safeguards
• truthfulness;
• empirical ethics
• research ethics

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all of the interviewees for investing their time and effort into participating in our study. Moreover, we would like to thank Annelies Van Tongelen for transcribing the interviews, and Yajing Zhong for assisting in the pilot-test of the interview guide.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2024.2362777.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Central Europe Leuven Strategic Alliance.