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Here is a model answer to a section A question provided by Steven Crumblehulme.  Thanks Steven.

CORE STUDIES 2 - SECTION A

A number of psychological studies break ethical guidelines.  One ethic that is broken is deception.  Using one of the following studies, answer the questions that follow.

Rosenhan
Milgram
Piliavin, Rodin and Piliavin

a) Describe how deception was used in your chosen study (6)

There are many ways in which deception is used in Milgram’s study.  One way is that the participants believed they were taking part in a study on ‘learning and memory.’  This involved deception because they were actually taking part in a study on how obedient they were.  Another way deception was used is that all participants believed they had an equal chance of being selected to be either the learner or the teacher.  However, this involved deception as the roles in the experiment were fixed, so that the confederate (actor) was always selected to be the learner.  A third way deception was used is that participants believed the shocks they delivered to the learner were real, and that they were in pain, however, no real shocks were actually administered. 

b) Give two reasons supporting the use of deception in your chosen study and two reasons against the use of deception in your chosen study (12)

One reason for using deception in Milgram’s study is that the study could not have worked without deceiving participants.  For example, if the participants knew that the shocks were not real and that the study was investigating obedience, they could have behaved due to demand characteristics, which means behaving the way Milgram would want them to.  Therefore, by deceiving participants, it increases the chance of them behaving naturally, without demand characteristics

Another reason for using deception in Milgram’s study is that the ends justify the means.  For example, without deception, Milgram would not have found how obedient people are to an authority figure.  This contribution to our understanding of people’s behaviour is more important than upsetting a group of people by deceiving them.

A reason against the use of deception is that it is unethical.  For example, by deceiving participants into thinking they are giving electric shocks, might cause mental harm.  Some participants had seizures and panic attacks because they believed they were hurting someone.  Therefore, by deceiving participants, other ethics, such as protection, can be broken.

A second reason against the use of deception is that it may discourage participants from taking part in future psychological research.  For example, participants may not like being deceived, especially to the extent they were in Milgram’s study, and lose faith in psychologists.  If people begin to not want to be part of research, psychologists will have problems recruiting enough participants to have representative samples.

c) Suggest one way in which your chosen study could have been conducted without the use of deception and say how this might affect the results. (8)

One way Milgram’s study could be conducted without the use of deception would be to inform participants that the study was to see how obedient people are towards authority figures, that they would always be the teacher, that the shocks would be fake and the learner would be an actor pretending to be hurt.  This would remove all deception involved and then participants could go through the same procedure that Milgram used originally, where the teacher has to teach word pairs to the learner.  The learner would get most of them wrong and Milgram would record the obedience levels shown.

This would drastically affect the results as, if participants displayed obedient behaviour, it could just be the result of demand characteristics, as they know what the study is about.  This would also lead to problems in the validity of the results, as they would not be measuring their natural levels of obedience, but their behaviour they think they are supposed to display.  These affects on the results would mean that they could not be generalised to explain obedient behaviour in everyday situations because the behaviour measured would be fake.