ABSTRACT

We conducted focus groups with participants of a laboratory experiment on cheating with the aim to describe and structure participants’ lived experience with the experiment and to compare their perceptions with experimenters’ expectations. Our results suggest that participants often perceive both control and experimental conditions differently than intended by an experimenter. For example, the participants’ decisions may be affected by feeling that they have to make a choice and do not have the opportunity to leave the experimental situation; by not believing in the anonymity of the experiment, by misunderstanding of random processes, or by other considerations other than the ethicality, for example by how entertaining or effortful is the chosen course of action. Our results underscore how difficult it is to achieve internal validity even in laboratory research. We conclude that the laboratory research of dishonesty would be improved by taking into account different perceived frames of experimental designs.

摘要

我们与实验室作弊实验的参与者进行了焦点小组，目的是描述和构建参与者在实验中的生活体验，并将他们的看法与实验者的期望进行比较。我们的结果表明，参与者通常对控制和实验条件的感知与实验者的预期不同。例如，参与者的决定可能会受到他们必须做出选择而没有机会离开实验情境的感觉；不相信实验的匿名性，对随机过程的误解，或出于道德以外的其他考虑，例如所选择的行动过程有多有趣或多努力。我们的结果强调了即使在实验室研究中也很难实现内部效度。我们得出的结论是，通过考虑不同的实验设计感知框架，不诚实的实验室研究会得到改善。