Compare methods

	Bogus Pipeline	Cover Story Deception
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1971	1959
Originator	Edward Jones & Harold Sigall	Classic experimental social psychology
Type	Methodological technique to reduce social-desirability bias	Methodological design controlling participant expectations
Seminal source	Jones, E. E., & Sigall, H. (1971). The bogus pipeline: A new paradigm for measuring affect and attitude. Psychological Bulletin, 76(5), 349-364.	Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203-210.
Aliases	Bogus Pipeline Procedure, Fake Lie Detector Method, Pipeline-to-the-Truth Technique	Deception Design, Cover Story Method, Experimental Deception
Related	3	3
Summary	The bogus pipeline, devised by Jones and Sigall in 1971, is a methodological technique for reducing social-desirability bias in the measurement of attitudes, especially sensitive ones such as prejudice. Participants are connected to an impressive-looking apparatus and convinced that it functions as an accurate lie detector capable of revealing their true feelings. Believing that dishonesty will be exposed, participants are motivated to report their attitudes truthfully rather than giving socially acceptable answers. In the classic procedure participants are asked to predict what the machine will say about them, which encourages them to consult and disclose their genuine attitudes. By comparing reports given under the bogus pipeline with ordinary self-reports, researchers can estimate the extent of social-desirability distortion and obtain more candid measures of socially sensitive attitudes. The technique was an early and influential solution to a fundamental problem in attitude measurement.	Cover story and deception design is the methodological practice of concealing a study's true purpose behind a plausible false rationale so that participants behave spontaneously rather than in line with what they think the experimenter wants. Because people who guess a study's hypothesis may consciously or unconsciously alter their behavior -- the problem of demand characteristics -- social psychologists often present a cover story that misdirects attention, embed the real dependent measure within an apparently unrelated task, and, when necessary, use additional deceptions such as confederates or false feedback. This approach made possible many of the field's classic findings on conformity, obedience, helping, and dissonance, where awareness of the true question would have destroyed the phenomenon. Deception carries serious ethical obligations, requiring justification, minimization of harm, suspicion probing, and thorough debriefing, which contemporary practice and ethics codes strictly govern.