Short Answer

A psychology department notices a trend where student participants from a participant pool have become highly skeptical during experiments and are frequently trying to guess the 'real' hypothesis rather than responding naturally. Apply the critics' arguments against deception to explain the likely cause of this behavior.

Question: A psychology department notices a trend where student participants from a participant pool have become highly skeptical during experiments and are frequently trying to guess the 'real' hypothesis rather than responding naturally. Apply the critics' arguments against deception to explain the likely cause of this behavior.

Sample answer: This behavioral trend is likely caused by the participants previously discovering that they had been deceived in other research studies. According to critics of deception, discovering deception fosters distrust among participants, which subsequently leads them to provide less honest or natural responses in future studies because they assume they are being misled again.

Key points:

  • Prior experience with deceptive studies led participants to discover they were misled.
  • Discovering deception fostered distrust toward researchers and experimental instructions.
  • Distrust causes participants to be less honest and natural in their responses in subsequent research.

Rubric: Grading Rubric: - Correctly identifies that previous exposure to deception led to discovery of being misled. - Connects the discovery of deception to the development of participant distrust. - Explains how this distrust causes participants to alter their behavior (trying to guess hypotheses, less honest/natural responding) in future studies.

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Updated 2026-05-26

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Research Methods in Psychology - 4th American Edition @ KPU

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