Debriefing for ego threat may require more than we thought

Sad, from Flickr user Megadeth’s Girl, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Sad

When social psychologists manipulate a participant’s attitudes or beliefs, we have an ethical obligation to undo that manipulation. I explain it to my students as “putting the participant back the way we found them.”

We frequently use a debriefing procedure, in the form of a written and/or (as in the case of my lab) verbal notice something to the effect of “yuk yuk, gosh, ya know what? we were just kidding. the thing you (read/did) was fake, we made it up, and it doesn’t mean anything.”

Here is an example from the verbal debriefing script I used in a study several years ago that presented participants with a fake newspaper article about vandalism by University of Texas students.

I want to thank you for your participation here today and for your contribution to this project. We really appreciate your help with this work. Let me tell you a little bit about what we are trying to study.

First, we want to assure you that the incident you read about never happened on the campus. We created a fake newspaper article about it in order to better understand how people respond to these kinds of situations. To our knowledge, no University of Texas students have ever been involved in such an incident.

A new article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (i.e., Miketta & Friese, 2019) casts doubt on the effectiveness of such debriefings, especially when they are done to undo the effects of ego manipulations—manipulations designed to change someone’s self-perception. These manipulations are usually referred to as false feedback, where participants engage in some task ostensibly to measure some personally-relevant property such as intelligence, ability, personality, etc. The false feedback is meant to manipulate the participants’ self-relevant thoughts.

“Several debriefing procedures failed to fully undo the aversive effects of ego-threatening experiences on participants’ well-being. Only an extensive process debriefing largely reestablished prestudy conditions. However, even then, negative affective after-effects persisted for at least 2 weeks. Restoring participants’ well-being after ego-threatening experiences appears to be more difficult than previously believed. The positive antidote needs to be strong. It remains for future research to continue identifying the necessary ingredients of such antidotes.” (Miketta & Friese, 2019, p. 25)

The authors of the article point out that prior research (i.e., Ross et al., 1975 & McFarland et al., 2007) has demonstrated that simple written or verbal debriefings like the one in my experiment above (what the authors refer to as Standard Outcome Debriefings) are largely ineffective at undoing false feedback results. This prior research showed that the only effective means was via a Revised Outcome Debriefing, which told participants that they got false feedback and, crucially, that the measure that was used was invalid and did not measure any underlying personal characteristics at all. This presumably kept participants from ruminating about the results.

This new article presents the results of six studies that looked at the effectiveness of debriefing methods specifically in the context of ego threat manipulations. They found in the first three studies that a written Revised Outcome Debriefing did not eliminate the adverse effects of the ego threat manipulation on self-esteem, self-perception, or mood. The detrimental effects persevered for at least several hours after leaving the experiment. The last three studies tested various supplements or changes in the debriefing, including verbal debriefing, and written debriefing with self-affirmation, and an elaborate 10-15 minute “sensitive, caring, emotionally warm, attentive, and considerate manner” (Miketta & Friese, 2019, p. 18). This elaborate debriefing required experimenters to be trained by a psychologist over the course of several weeks. a second elaborate debriefing was tested that added an explanation of the psychological basis of the perseverance of the mood manipulation effects and instructions to counteract that perseverance effect.

The only debriefing that fully eliminated the detriment to self-esteem and self-perception was the second elaborate one. None of the debriefings fully attenuated the effects of ego threat on mood.

Importantly, an internal meta-analysis of all six studies taken together showed none of the debriefings fully eliminated the effects of the ego threat.

From the standpoint of ethical treatment of our participants, we are always balancing risk and benefits. If the (potential or actual) benefits of the research to the participants and humanity at large are sufficiently large, we may be willing to accept more risks; if they are lesser, then we will accept less risk.

In the context of these findings, the authors point out that there may be little to no risk of the detrimental effects of the ego threat manipulation. That may be true at least for psychologically well individuals, and even for these individuals, it is not clear what harm they may suffer from the ego threat manipulation aside from what is indicated by these measures of self-esteem and self-perception and mood. Further, what level of detrimental effects would cause a clinically significant effect in individuals?

In addition, these detrimental effects may have other, unknown or unrecognized downstream effects. Perhaps the self-perception or self-esteem reduction might cause an individual to underperform in a job interview and lose a career opportunity. The participant might not recognize this outcome as resulting from the ego threat manipulation, and so would not report it as an adverse effect to the experimenter or the IRB.

So, what we know is that our written, and even verbal, debriefing procedures may reduce but not fully eliminate the effects of our manipulations, at least in the case of ego threat. But we do not know how much of an adverse effect the failure to eliminate the effect might have on participants, and so can’t say definitively that they do or don’t experience risk from the manipulation that is minimal: “not greater in and of themselves than those ordinarily encountered in daily life,” as defined in the federal regulations 45 CFR 46.102(j). It would seem to be very individual and contextual. As usual, more research is necessary to better understand the potential persistence of manipulation effects despite debriefings.

IRB committees can consider this study a cautionary tale, but I think there is not yet enough evidence that debriefings don’t work to undo the effects of a psychological manipulation. I think we can be a little more comfortable with more elaborate verbal debriefings, that include explanations of how effects of the experiment might persist and information about how to counteract such persistence, than we might be with simple written debriefings. But even that conclusion is not fully supported by evidence. We still need to make a subjective judgment call on these situations.

McFarland, C., Cheam, A., & Buehler, R. (2007). The perseverance effect in the debriefing paradigm: Replication and extension. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 233–240. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2006.01.010

Miketta, S., & Friese, M. (2019). Debriefed but still troubled? About the (in)effectiveness of postexperimental debriefings after ego threat. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000155

Ross, L., Lepper, M. R., & Hubbard, M. (1975). Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: Biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 880–892. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.32.5.880

How Kids Learn Prejudice

In class this week, we were discussing observational learning (AKA social learning) and then moved into cognition and the formation of stereotypes. Children are constantly observing the behavior of adult models in their environment and learning behaviors from them.

The NY Times has a good article written by a social psychologist on the ways children learn social attitudes and prejudice. She argues (well, I think) that the candidacy (and potential presidency) of Donald Trump may have some deleterious effects on children’s social attitudes and behaviors.

Also at stake are the attitudes Mr. Trump’s discourse would transmit to a generation of children.

Source: How Kids Learn Prejudice

Threat and Prejudice and Moral Exclusion, Oh My!

This is why I do the research I do on the power of perceived threat in prejudice and moral exclusion:

Ken Knight, 54, a heating and cooling technician from Florence, S.C., said he agrees with Bush and Cruz that only Christian refugees should be let into the country.”I wouldnt bring the Muslims. They cut your head off. You cant trust them. Im sure there are good ones, but theyre like the mob. Once you get in, you cant trust them,” he said after a church service

I want to understand that strange thought process.

And, of course, Christians and terrorists are mutually exclusive, aren’t they?

Link to the article: Cruz: ‘No meaningful risk’ of Christians committing terrorism – The Washington Post.

Advice for thrifty holiday shopping

David DeSteno has a very good Op-Ed piece on the best ways to avoid excess spending and impulse buying. He argues that willpower often fails because it is a finite resource (cf. Baumeister’s research on self-control as a limited resource, depleted on use discussed here earlier)*. Instead, he says, use feelings of gratitude. He describes an experiment that showed that feeling grateful resulted in more delayed gratification than neutral or positive feelings. Check it out.

Link to the article on nytimes.com

As hokey as it sounds, the solution to the shopping season’s excesses may lie in the very message of Thanksgiving itself.

* Caveat: this research is currently part of a replication project to see how strong the effect is. Stay tuned.

Botox, Depression, and Embodiment

In Social Cognition, we read a review article about embodiment – the idea that our cognitions and emotions are influenced by our physiological states. Embodied cognition and emotion research is really in its early stages, but it has a long history – back to Darwin’s studies. Some of these studies (for example, Paul Ekman’s research) indicate that by manipulating our facial muscles to simulate emotions induces the emotional state physiologically and psychologically.

The NY Times has an article on new research that shows greater depression relief among people who had Botox than a saline control injection in their forehead muscles, which are involved in frowning.

I was thinking about this from a social psychological perspective, and believe that at least part of this effect may be a social one. Consider that someone who has a history of depression likely has a social network used to seeing the person depressed. Those individuals may be interacting with the depressed person in ways that reinforce the depression, for example, with pity or sadness (cf. self-fulfilling prophecy). Now consider how those people might respond if the depressed person’s expression has less indicators of depression because of the Botox injections. They may respond to the person with more positive affect and thus lifting the person’s mood.

That proposition has lots of assumptions that I don’t have the time to validate, but it seems plausible on the face.

Link to the NY Times article “Don’t Worry, Get Botox”

[T]hese Botox studies underscore one of the biggest challenges in treating people with depression. [Depressed individuals] might think that the reason they are depressed is that they have little interest in the world or their friends — a mistaken notion that is the result, not the cause, of their depression. They insist that only once they feel better will it make sense for them to rejoin the world, socialize and start smiling. Their therapists would be well advised to challenge their inverted sense of causality and insist that they will start feeling better after they re-engage with the world.

And, I would add to that quote, the world re-engages with them in positive ways.

Diane Halpern on Hyperpartisanship

One of the authors of the book we are using in Introduction to Psychology this semester is Diane Halpern. She recently won an award from the Association for Psychological Science, and gave a talk on cognitive psychology research on hyperpartisanship. Here’s a link: Link

A cognitive scientist, Halpern called on American citizens to adopt several practices that can ease the ideological divisions that plague the country today. She pointed to 70 years’ worth of research showing that cooperation and interaction are key ways to minimize prejudice and improve intergroup relations.

Excellent NYT Magazine piece on Stapel and his fraud

The New York Times Magazine has an excellent piece on Deiderik Stapel and his fraud (posted earlier here and here and here and here and here and here and here). It chronicles the days leading up to the accusation, his family and childhood. One interesting piece of local trivia: He briefly attended East Stroudsburg University to study acting.

Here is a link to the article at the NY Times Magazine: link

A great quote:

He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said.

and in the exposé of the first of his frauds…

In one experiment conducted with undergraduates recruited from his class, Stapel asked subjects to rate their individual attractiveness after they were flashed an image of either an attractive female face or a very unattractive one. The hypothesis was that subjects exposed to the attractive image would — through an automatic comparison — rate themselves as less attractive than subjects exposed to the other image.

The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his hypothesis was valid. “I said — you know what, I am going to create the data set,” he told me.

Sitting at his kitchen table in Groningen, he began typing numbers into his laptop that would give him the outcome he wanted. …Stapel at first ended up getting a bigger difference between the two conditions than was ideal. He went back and tweaked the numbers again. It took a few hours of trial and error, spread out over a few days, to get the data just right.

He said he felt both terrible and relieved. The results were published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2004. “I realized — hey, we can do this,” he told me.

Social psychology in the wake of the Stapel debacle

The Times Higher Education (UK) has a piece by Stephen Gibson, Honorary secretary, British Psychological Society, Social psychology section that decries the singling out of social psychology as a discipline in need of a scientific conduct overhaul. Link to the article.

Stapel, Fraud, Inflated Type-I Error, and the Future of Social Psychology

This week the final report on the Diederik Stapel debacle was released. The press release is here, and you can download the whole report here. From the press release:

The Committees identified 55 publications in which it is certain that Stapel committed fraud during his time in Groningen and Tilburg. In addition, eleven older publications by Stapel published when he worked in Amsterdam and Groningen show indications of fraud. The earliest dates from 1996. A total of ten doctoral dissertations supervised by Stapel are ‘contaminated’ (seven in Groningen and three from recent years in Tilburg).

I thought this might be a good place to compile some links to some of the articles and interesting pieces in this case.

The web page of the Joint Tilburg/Groningen/Amsterdam investigation of the publications by Mr. Stapel is here.

A recent article in The Atlantic titled “The Data Vigilante” covers Uri Simonsohn, who has developed an algorithm to detect anomolies in data that might indicate fraud or inflated Type-I error. (Dec 2012)

A recent post in Science magazine’s ScienceInsider about the affair: Final Report: Stapel Affair Points to Bigger Problems in Social Psychology (Nov 2012)

Here is a link to Simonsohn’s recent article in Psychological Science titled “False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant.” Here, he details a number of intentional and unintentional ways that results can achieve statistical significance as a product of experimenter effects (he calss this “researcher degrees of freedom”) rather than the experimental effect itself. (Nov 2011)

Here is a good article in the NY Times by Benedict Carey on the initial findings in the case. (Nov 2011)

An article from Nature on the initial report. (Nov 2011)

In addition to Stapel, at least two other social psychologists have resigned their positions amid allegations of fraud. Derek Smeesters, also in the Netherlands resigned after Uri Simonsohn’s data analytic technique was applied to his data. An article about that is published in Science magazine’s ScienceInsider. (July 2012)

This algorithm has raised concern that a new witch hunt may be underway where individuals are selected for unknown reasons to subject their data to this technique in order to discover more fraudulent findings. In fact, a second social psychologist was implicated by Simonsohn’s technique, Mark Sanna at the University of Michigan. Sanna resigned and asked JESP to retract three of his papers. Nature has an article on that. (July 2012)

To add to our paranoia, a post on the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s listserv came out earlier this year which described emails being sent to individual members requesting their data. These emails originated from “Jay Zimmerman” and “Laurie Rhodes,” both of whom do not appear to be real researchers via internet searches. It turns out this was part of a research project that included deception about the intention of the data collection. This is covered in this Google Groups post by social psychologist Brian Nosak.