Effectiveness of debriefing following deception experiments.

Abstract

This study was designed to test the notion that deception experiments might be especially disturbing to a person already concerned about the area involved in the deception. Specifically, it was hypothesized that if a person who was extremely concerned about his adequacy in social situations was given false information about his adequacy as part of an experiment, it might not be easy to debrief him at the end of the experiment. In this experiment, degree of concern about one's social skills was varied in 2 ways: concern was manipulated; high-concern and low-concern Ss were selected on the basis of a personality test. Regardless of the way in which concern was varied, there is no evidence that high-concern Ss are more difficult to debrief than low-concern Ss. Unfortunately, however, there is evidence that (a) regardless of degree of concern, debriefing may not be effective immediately, and (b) debriefing may be ineffective, even after a longer time delay, for certain personality types.