A Procedure for Explaining Experiments Involving Deception

When an experiment involves deception, the investigator is obliged by ethical principles to provide the participants with full clarification upon its completion. The clarification procedure or debriefing may itself have harmful effects unless conducted with great care and sensitivity. Satisfactory debriefing requires considerable preparation and skill. This paper presents a debriefing procedure, including a specific example or debriefing scenario, which has been developed over 20 years of debriefing and which can be adapted to explain any experiment using deception. It is hoped that its presentation will help to improve the general quality of debriefing by providing a guide which will be useful for novice experimenters and by stimulating thought and discussion about how a debriefing should be conducted.