Ethics, deception, and 'Those Milgram experiments'

Critics who allege that deception in psychology experiments is unjustified frequently cite Stanley Milgram's 'obedience experiments' as evidence. These critics say that arguments for justification tend to downplay the risks involved and overstate the benefits from such research. Milgram, they add, committed both sins. Critics are right to point out that research oversight is often susceptible to self-serving abuse. But stating a priori how beneficial a given experiment will be is a tall order for psychologists, or anyone else. At the same time, critics themselves have difficulty in showing what is wrong with deception, and how subjects in these experiments suffer. Hence, it becomes unclear what the psychologists, including Milgram, are prone to downplay. There is also room to wonder how the Milgram studies can illuminate the debate over deception. Although Milgram probably exaggerated the scientific significance of his own work, critics who exaggerate its moral and historical significance do little to clarify the status of deception.     

Gordon Allport, character, and the "culture of personality," 1897-1937

This article examines the cultural context of early American personality psychology through a consideration of the early career of Gordon Allport. Between 1921 and 1937, Allport was among the leading figures in the movement to establish personality as a research category in American psychology. Far from being a strictly scientific concern, Allport's project was deeply embedded in the cultural politics of the age. Of particular importance was the gradual erosion of the language of character and the self-sacrificing, morally grounded self that it supported. Allport's "psychology of personality" helped fuel this trend while simultaneously attempting to resist it. His experience illustrates the elasticity and moral ambiguity of the newly emerging category of personality.     

Online deception: prevalence, motivation, and emotion.

This research has three goals: first, to find out how prevalent online deception is within a sample of Israeli users, second, to explore the underlying motivations to deceive online, and third, to discover the emotions that accompany online deception. A web-based survey was distributed in 14 discussion groups, and the answers of 257 respondents were analyzed. It was found that, while most of the respondents believe that online deception is very widespread, only about one-third of them reported engaging in online deception. Frequent users deceive online more than infrequent users, young users more than old, and competent users more than non-competent. The most common motivations to deceive online were "play" on the one hand and privacy concerns on the other. Most people felt a sense of enjoyment while engaging in online deception. The results are discussed in light of a possible mechanism for changing personal moral standards.     

The rise and fall of deception in social psychology and personality research, 1921 to 1994

The frequency of the use of deception in American psychological research was studied by reviewing articles from journals in personality and social psychology from 1921 to 1994. Deception was used rarely during the developmental years of social psychology into the 1930s, then grew gradually and irregularly until the 1950s. Between the 1950s and 1970s the use of deception increased significantly. This increase is attributed to changes in experimental methods, the popularity of realistic impact experiments, and the influence of cognitive dissonance theory. Since 1980 there appears to have been a decrease in the use of deception as compared to previous decades which is related to changes in theory, methods, ethical standards, and federal regulation of research.     

Are There Moral Limits to Military Deception?

It is widely agreed that deception of the enemy can be morally permissible in war. However, the question of the morally acceptable limits to deception in war has barely been explored in contemporary ethics. This paper defends the thesis that there are no moral limits on military deception per se, that is, no limits based on the ethics of truthfulness. Rather, all moral restriction against deception in war is based on another moral principle: military deception is morally unacceptable only when it violates the principle of not harming those who do not intend to harm us.     

The cognition of deception: the role of executive processes in producing lies

The cognitive processes used in deception have been largely overlooked in the literature on deception. The author's position in this review is that effortful executive processes (inhibition, working memory, and other mental management mechanisms) are central cognitive components for lie production. The author provides evidence from 3 bodies of literature: studies on lie detection, developmental research on cognition related to children's deception, and imaging research describing neural correlates of deception. In addition, the author reviews the available theories that implicate executive functions as core processes in deception. The author also discusses implications of this research as they relate to future research and applications on the psychology of deception.     

SELF‐KNOWLEDGE AND MORAL STUPIDITY

Most commonplace moral failure is not conditioned by evil intentions or the conscious desire to harm or humiliate others. It is more banal and ubiquitous – a form of moral stupidity that gives rise to rationalization, self‐deception, failures of due moral consideration, and the evasion of responsibility. A kind of crude, perception‐distorting self‐absorption, moral stupidity is the cause of many moral missteps; moral development demands the development of self‐knowledge as a way out of moral stupidity. Only once aware of the presence or absence of particular desires and beliefs can an agent have authority over them or exercise responsibility for their absence. But what is the connection between self‐knowledge and moral development? I argue that accounts (such as Kant's and Richard Moran's) which construe instances of self‐knowledge as like the verdicts of a judge cannot explain its potential role in moral development, and claim that it must be conceived of in a way that makes possible a process of self‐refinement and self‐regulation. Making use of Buddhist moral psychology, I argue that when self‐knowledge plays a role in moral development, it includes a quality of attention to one's experience best modeled as the work of the craftsperson, not as judge.     

Social contract theory and the ethics of deception in consumer research

Deception of research participants is a pervasive ethical issue in experimental consumer research. Content analyses find as many as three-fourths of published human participant studies in our field involved some form of deception, almost all of which employed experimental methodologies. However, researchers have little guidance on the acceptability of the use of deception, notwithstanding the codes of root disciplines. We turn to theories of moral philosophy and use social contract theory specifically to identify conditions under which deception may be justified as morally permissible. Seven guiding principles for research practice are formulated and their implications for consumer researchers are identified, together with practical recommendations for decision making on studies involving deception.     

Vocational behavior and career development, 1983: A review

This article reviews the literature related to vocational behavior and career development published during 1983. Journals in the fields of psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior were examined, and 445 relevant articles published in 42 different journals were identified. The review is organized around issues pertinent to the counseling psychology perspective (i.e., career development, vocational choice, vocational behavior of women, assessment, intervention strategies) and the industrial/organizational psychology perspective (i.e., personnel functions, worker adjustment problems, work adjustment) on vocational behavior.     

Hypocrisy as Either Deception or Akrasia

The intuitive, folk concept of hypocrisy is not a unified moral category. While many theorists hold that all cases of hypocrisy involve some form of deception, I argue that this is not the case. Instead, I argue for a disjunctive account of hypocrisy whereby all cases of “hypocrisy” involve either the deceiving of others about the sincerity of an agent's beliefs or the lack of will to carry through with the demands of an agent's sincere beliefs. Thus, all cases of hypocrisy can be described either as cases of deception or as cases of akrasia. If this analysis correct, then I suggest further that the moral status of all instances of hypocrisy must be reduced either to the moral blameworthiness of deception or to the moral blameworthiness of akrasia. There can be no unified account of the moral wrongness of “hypocrisy” that holds across the disjunction.     

A personal encounter with psychology (1937-2002)

An undergraduate assistantship with Abraham Maslow, research with Solomon Asch, and an indirect exposure to Ernest Nagel's philosophy of science encouraged Howard H. Kendler to become involved with methodological issues in psychology. Graduate training with Kenneth Spence led to an active research career that was initially immersed in the latent learning controversy and later, with the collaboration of his wife Tracy Kendler, in the extension of the Hull-Spence model of cognitive development. Methodological concerns from a variety of sources encouraged Kendler to express his ideas on the methodology and history of psychology as well as its role in ethical and social policy issues. A productive symbiotic relationship is created from the interaction of democracy, natural-science psychology, and moral pluralism.     

Ability,Responsibility, and Global Justice

Many have argued that we have a moral obligation to assist others in need, but given the scope of global suffering, how far does this obligation extend? According to one traditional philosophical view, the obligation to help others is limited by our ability to help them, or by the principle that “ought implies can.” This view is primarily defended on the grounds that it is a core principle of commonsense moral psychology. This paper reviews findings from experimental philosophy in cognitive science demonstrating that “ought implies can” is rejected by moral psychology. Researchers find that moral obligations are ascribed to agents who cannot fulfill them, suggesting that moral requirements do sometimes extend beyond what we are able to do. This research furthers our understanding of moral obligation, identifies an important need for further cross-cultural work in moral psychology, and demonstrates a way in which scientific experimentation can be applied to improve upon the conceptual analysis of important philosophical concepts in normative ethics.

     

Cross-cultural differences in children's choices, categorizations, and evaluations of truths and lies

This study examined cross-cultural differences and similarities in children's moral understanding of individual- or collective-oriented lies and truths. Seven-, 9-, and 11-year-old Canadian and Chinese children were read stories about story characters facing moral dilemmas about whether to lie or tell the truth to help a group but harm an individual or vice versa. Participants chose to lie or to tell the truth as if they were the character (Experiments 1 and 2) and categorized and evaluated the story characters' truthful and untruthful statements (Experiments 3 and 4). Most children in both cultures labeled lies as lies and truths as truths. The major cultural differences lay in choices and moral evaluations. Chinese children chose lying to help a collective but harm an individual, and they rated it less negatively than lying with opposite consequences. Chinese children rated truth telling to help an individual but harm a group less positively than the alternative. Canadian children did the opposite. These findings suggest that cross-cultural differences in emphasis on groups versus individuals affect children's choices and moral judgments about truth and deception.     

Cryptonormative Judgments

A cryptonormative judgment, roughly speaking, is a judgment that is presented by the agent who makes it as non‐normative (either generally or in some particular respect), but that is in fact normative (either generally or in that particular respect). The idea of cryptonormativity is familiar from debates in social theory, social psychology, and continental political philosophy, but has to my knowledge never been treated in analytic metaethics, moral psychology or epistemology except in passing. In this paper, I argue, first, that cryptonormative judgments are pervasive: familiar cases from everyday life are most naturally diagnosed as cryptonormative judgments. Secondly, they reveal that normative judgment is a state that can be quite deeply non‐transparent to its bearer, in a way that is not, for example, assimilable to the phenomenon of self‐deception. Thirdly, they shed light on debates over amoralism and lend some support to a picture of normative psychology that links normative judgment constitutively to motivation. In the conclusion, I make some remarks about the social and political insidiousness of cryptonormativity, looking forward to future work.     

A comparison of the work needs,attitudes, and preferences of professional accountants at different career stages

Although the concept of career stages has played an increasingly important role in vocational psychology, little research exists on career stage differences among professionals. In the present study, a sample of male professional accountants (N = 764) at different career stages were compared with respect to their work needs, work attitudes (intrinsic and extrinsic satisfaction, organizational and professional commitment), and vocational preferences. Accountants at different stages were found to differ significantly in their needs, work attitudes, and the extent to which they fit the Conventional type in Holland's model. In particular, accountants over the age of 60, in the preretirement stage of their career, when compared to their younger counterparts, reported significantly lower levels of job satisfaction but higher levels of organizational and professional commitment, and they demonstrate weaker higher-order needs but stronger security needs.     

SELF‐DECEPTION ABOUT EMOTION

In this paper, I address an ignored topic in the literature on self‐deception—instances in which one is self‐deceived about their emotions. Most discussions of emotion and self‐deception address either the contributory role of emotion to instances of self‐deception involving beliefs or assume what I argue is an outdated view of emotion according to which emotions just are beliefs or some other type of propositional attitude. In order to construct an account of self‐deception about emotion, I draw a distinction between two variants of self‐deception about emotion: cognitively motivated self‐deception and phenomenologically motivated self‐deception. After providing an account of each variant, I discuss the importance of the role that perception plays in cases of self‐deception about emotion. I conclude with a comment on the relevance of this discussion for contemporary debates in moral theory.     

认知负荷取向下基于记忆-反应冲突的欺骗检测

欺骗检测一直是心理学的重要研究问题。基于欺骗理论的认知视角, 研究者提出欺骗检测的认知负荷取向。采用隐瞒信息测试这一测谎范式, 通过操纵认知负荷影响个体在虚假反应时的记忆-反应冲突解决过程, 考察增加认知负荷对欺骗检测的影响, 以期更好地揭示欺骗检测的认知机制。在此基础上, 以普通人群和犯罪嫌疑人为被试探查基于记忆-反应冲突的欺骗检测的行为和生理指标, 并根据获得的行为和生理指标, 采用机器学习方法进行建模, 预测个体的欺骗行为。研究结果将服务于司法、安防和人际交往等领域的欺骗检测。     

Social Responsibility Ethics: Doing Right,doing Good,doing Well

The ethics of social responsibility is discussed in reference to six case vignettes drawn from forensic psychology. A definitional model of social responsibility is proposed, and two unequal components of the concept—respect for the individual and concern for social welfare—are identified. The sources of ethical conflict in regard to social responsibility are enumerated. Scholarly criticism of the value orientation of forensic psychology is reviewed, and forensic psychology is contrasted with social policy advocacy efforts made by organized psychology. The social responsibility obligations of psychologists in the microethical sphere, where their actions affect individuals, are diffentiated from the obligations psychology has when operating in the macroethical sphere of social policy. The ethical problems inherent in policy advocacy brought about by individual psychologists working with individuals are underscored: the inevitable element of deception, the violation of role integrity, and the circumvention of social structures and institutions that safeguard the rights of individuals.     

Deception in Experiments: Revisiting the Arguments in Its Defense

In psychology, deception is commonly used to increase experimental control. Yet, its use has provoked concerns that it raises participants' suspicions, prompts second-guessing of experimenters' true intentions, and ultimately distorts behavior and endangers the control it is meant to achieve. Over time, these concerns regarding the methodological costs of the use of deception have been subjected to empirical analysis. We review the evidence stemming from these studies.