Editing Informed consent (section)

===Deception===

Research involving deception is controversial given the requirement for informed consent. Deception typically arises in social psychology, when researching a particular psychological process requires that investigators deceive subjects. For example, in the [[Milgram experiment]], researchers wanted to determine the willingness of participants to obey authority figures despite their personal conscientious objections. They had authority figures demand that participants deliver what they thought was an electric shock to another research participant. For the study to succeed, it was necessary to deceive the participants so they believed that the subject was a peer and that their electric shocks caused the peer actual pain.

Nonetheless, research involving deception prevents subjects from exercising their basic right of autonomous informed decision-making and conflicts with the ethical principle of [[respect for persons]].

The [[Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct]] set by the [[American Psychological Association]] says that psychologists may conduct research that includes a deceptive compartment only if they can both justify the act by the value and importance of the study's results and show they could not obtain the results by some other way. Moreover, the research should bear no potential harm to the subject as an outcome of deception, either physical pain or [[emotional distress]]. Finally, the code requires a debriefing session in which the experimenter both tells the subject about the deception and gives subject the option of withdrawing the data.<ref>{{cite web|last=2. American Psychological Association. (2002)|title=2010 Amendments to the American Psychological Association ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct.|url=http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx|access-date=30 April 2012}}</ref>