Assignment No :01

Name : Shahzada Manahil

Subject : Social psychology
Section : A
Registration no : FA20-BPY-047
Semester no : Fourth semester
Submitted to : Mam Ayesha

Humanity Department
COMSATS UNIVERSITY OF LAHORE CAMPUS
Question no :01
What is deception? How we can be recognize it ?and what is the role on. Our
moods?
Answer:
 Deception:-
Deception is a methodological technique whereby a participant is not made fully
aware of the specific purposes of the study or is misinformed as part of the study. Two
main forms of deception may occur in research.

 The researcher intentionally misinforms the participant about some aspect of

the study.

 For example :
A researcher wanting to study how people respond to negative health feedback may
deceive participants by telling them a saliva test they took indicates that they may
have a disease, when in fact the test was only a manipulation used to create an
emotional response
.
 The researcher omits some information, such as not telling participants that a
study of “relationship formation with a stranger” actually deals with the
specifics of interracial interactions. This type of deception is based on the
notion that certain psychological processes may be biased if the participant
were aware of the exact nature of the study.

 A common form of deception is not fully disclosing the true nature of the study
until it is over. Here knowledge of the purposes of the study may cause
participants to act in less than spontaneous ways and may bias the results.
Additionally, the “stranger” in the study may not be another participant at all
but rather a trained member of the research team, called a confederate, whose
job it is to guide the interaction based on a script and evaluate the actual
participant. In this form of deception, the participants are not misinformed, but
they are not made fully aware of the specific purposes of the study. The use of
a confederate is another form of deception. In this example, it is true that the
participant was interacting with another person. The deception occurred
because the other person was not another participant but rather a member of the
research team, and the interaction was predetermined by an experimental script.
In this and other cases, deception can often be seen in the “cover story” for the
study, which provides the participant with a justification for the procedures and
measures used. The ultimate goal of using deception in research is to ensure
that the behaviors or reactions observed in a controlled laboratory setting are as
close as possible to those behaviors and reactions that occur outside of the
laboratory setting.

Role of deception on mood :

Affective experiences penetrate every aspect of our lives, and play an important role
in influencing many of our cognitive and behavioral strategies (Fiedler, 2001; Forgas,
2002).
Extensive re- search in recent years showed that affective states often have a strong
affect-congruent influence on thinking, memory and judgments, and also influence the
kinds of information processing strategies people adopt in social situations (Bless,
2001; Bless & Fiedler, 2006; Fiedler, 2001; Forgas, 2002). Surprisingly, the role of
affective states on interpersonal trust and the detection of deception have received
little attention. This is particularly inter- testing, given strong recent evidence that
mood states play an important role in how people process social information and how
they make sense of observed social behaviors in particular (Fiedler, 2001; Forgas,
1994, 2002; Sedikides, 1995).
Our interest here is in mild mood states rather than emotions, as subconscious moods
have been found to have more uniform, enduring and reliable cognitive and behavioral
consequences than is the case with highly context-specific emotions (Forgas, 2006)
. For our purposes, we may define moods as low-intensity, diffuse and relatively
enduring affective states without a salient anteced- ent cause and therefore little
cognitive content, whereas emotions are more intense, short-lived and usually have a
definite cause and clear cognitive content (Forgas, 1995, 2002).
Recent affect-cognition theories suggest that there are two cognitive mechanisms that
are responsible for mood effects on judgments:
(1) informational effects (influencing the content and valence of cognition..
(2) processing effects (influencing the process of cognition).

 Example

For example, deciding whether or not to believe a romantic partner, a friend, a child or
an employee are usually tasks loaded with affective significance. This paper seeks to
extend recent work on affect and social cognition to the domain of veracity judgments,
by demonstrating for the first time that temporary good or bad moods can have a
systematic and predictable influence on skepti cism and the ability to detect deception.

 History of Deception in Social Psychology

The use of deception can be tied to the earliest experiments in social psychology, but
it began in earnest after World War II when social psychology began to prosper. In the
1960s and 1970s, many of the most famous and most important social psychology
studies involved deception. One famous example is Stanley Milligram’s studies of
obedience in which the participants were told that they were to deliver strong
electrical shocks to a participant sitting in the next room. The shocks were never
administered, although the other person, who was a confederate, reacted as if they
were. As a result of critiques of these types of studies, both the type and amount of
deception used in current social psychology studies tend to be less extreme.

 References:
Korn, J. H. (1997). Illusions of reality: A history of deception in social psychology.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and
Behavioral Research. (1979). The Belmont report: Ethical principles and guidelines
for the protection of human subjects of research. Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office.