Hawthorne Effect and Deception in Research

Religion Psychology is one of those fields that often butts heads with religion. It does this in the sense that sometimes conclusions and outcomes from research can run counter to the religious beliefs that the psychologist holds near and dear. Christianity is certainly one of the religions that encounters a lot of discord with psychology given the ubiquity of both psychology and Christianity in the modern era of the United States, Europe and other fully modern countries.

In a modern context, it would seem to be increasingly more likely for psychology and Christianity to butt heads. Just one example would be the fact that many Christians cite the Holy Bible verses that seemingly deride homosexuality as inherently sinful and wrong. Psychology held the perspective for quite a long time that homosexuality was the sign of a mentally ill or mentally defective human being rather than being a product of genetics.

This mindset has since evolved and Christianity itself, even with those verses being there, has evolved as well (Childs, 2004). However, discord and disagreement between the field of psychology and the common Christian moral codes is still common. Indeed, if a Christian researcher is doing a study and he finds something or comes to a conclusion that disagrees with his religious or moral code, he would meet a dilemma. However, the right thing to do would be to accept the findings based on the evidence and details that exist.

Indeed, there may be a future point where the findings are found to be invalid after all. However, the Christian psychologist should not allow his religious beliefs to influence his theories, how he approaches his research and whether he can accept something that would seem to contradict what he holds near and dear.

For example, if does research that indicates that homosexuality or other sexual minority members are actually genetically predisposed to their sexuality rather than choosing it, the Christian research should accept those findings unless or until there is proof to the contrary (Weber & Pargament, 2014). Informed Consent Informed consent is a fairly important concept when it comes to doing ethical and complete research. However, there is also often a modicum of deception and misdirection when it comes to research.

While this may seem unseemly to some, there is some rationale behind it. Indeed, there is what is known as the Hawthorne effect. This is the idea that people will act differently if they are know they are being studied and assessed. The Hawthorne effect would also assert that if people in a study know precisely what is being measured, it will skew and throw off the results.

For example, if the racial views of a group are being assessed and the people being interviewed and studied know this, there is a very strong chance they will watch what they say very carefully due to the self-perceived implications of being considered ignorant, not forward-thinking or even a bigot. Of course, this trend can be counteracted by using anonymous surveys where only demographic information is collected, if that (Hagel et al., 2015). However, there are situations where informed consent has to dovetail with deception of some sort.

Informed consent is good in that it provides knowledge to the study participant that they are being assessed and studied. However, sometimes the only way to get the proper, full and truly spontaneous results is to use a bit of deception. For example, participants might get informed consent that they are part of a study that is looking at how long it takes from point A to point B in a metropolitan city, on average.

However, the real point of the study might be to see how safe the drivers are driving including whether they speed, how high over the speed limit they get, whether they stay in their lane, whether they signal and so forth. If the study participants are told about the latter, rather than just the former, before the study starts, there is a very high likelihood that the people driving in the study will behave "better" than they normally would if they were not being studied.

That may happen anyway but it almost certainly happen.