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Deception in Social Science Research: Is Informed Consent Possible?
Author(s) -
SOBLE ALAN
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
hastings center report
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.515
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1552-146X
pISSN - 0093-0334
DOI - 10.2307/3561449
Subject(s) - deception , informed consent , psychology , social psychology , internet privacy , medicine , computer science , alternative medicine , pathology
he principle of informed consent generally includes two necessary conditions for the proper treatment of human subjects in experimentation. The first condition, which has been widely discussed, is that the consent be obtained from subjects who agree to participate voluntarily, where voluntarism is understood negatively as the absence of coercion. The second condition, which is less often discussed, is that the consent must be informed. The Articles of the Nuremberg Tribunal and The Declaration of Helsinki both state that the subjects must be told the duration, methods, possible risks, and the purpose or aim of the experiment. The most recent HEW regulations agree: informed consent has not been obtained if there has been any element of deceit or fraud. These guidelines reflect our ordinary moral view that deception is morally unacceptable. During the past quarter-century the size of the scientific research establishment has vastly increased. Medical, sociological, and psychological research is being carried out at our universities and other institutions at a rapid rate. The success of this effort, measured in terms of the amount of knowledge gained, has been well documented. In some of this research, however, the human beings serving as subjects are deceived as to the purpose of the experiment. In social psychology, for example, the incidence of the use of deceptive research designs has been estimated to be as high as 38 percent,l and even though deception is less common in medical research, many examples are available.2 One immediate response is to say that "the experiment ought not to be performed and the desired knowledge should be sought by means of a different research design."3 But this response overlooks the crucial point that certain bits of knowledge cannot, for logical reasons alone, be obtained without the use of deception. The testing of some hypotheses, within both psychology and medicine, requires that the subjects not be informed of the purpose or aim of the experiment being conducted. We are faced then with a moral dilemma. Since the search