Compare methods

	Bogus Pipeline	Cover Story Deception	False Consensus Paradigm	Induced Compliance Paradigm
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1971	1959	1977	1959
Originator	Edward Jones & Harold Sigall	Classic experimental social psychology	Lee Ross, David Greene & Pamela House	Leon Festinger & James Carlsmith
Type	Methodological technique to reduce social-desirability bias	Methodological design controlling participant expectations	Experimental paradigm for social-perception bias	Experimental paradigm for cognitive dissonance
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.	Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The 'false consensus effect': An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279-301.	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	False Consensus Effect, Egocentric Projection Paradigm, Consensus Estimation Task	Forced Compliance Paradigm, Counter-attitudinal Advocacy Paradigm, Festinger-Carlsmith Paradigm
Related	3	3	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.	The false consensus paradigm, established by Ross, Greene, and House in 1977, demonstrates a pervasive bias in social perception: people overestimate the extent to which others share their own choices, beliefs, and behaviors. In the canonical procedure, participants indicate their own position on some issue or choice -- famously, whether they would walk around campus wearing a sandwich-board sign -- and then estimate what proportion of their peers would do the same. The signature finding is that those who choose a given option estimate that option to be more common than do those who reject it, so each group projects its own response onto others. Ross and colleagues also showed that people view their own responses as relatively common and unrevealing of personality while seeing differing responses as uncommon and diagnostic of others' traits. The paradigm became a foundational demonstration of egocentric bias in social judgment and attribution.	The induced (forced) compliance paradigm, introduced by Festinger and Carlsmith in 1959, is the classic experimental test of cognitive dissonance theory. Participants are led to perform a counter-attitudinal act -- typically telling another person that a boring task was enjoyable -- under either low or high justification (in the original, paid one dollar versus twenty dollars). Dissonance theory predicts the counterintuitive result that those paid less change their private attitudes more, coming to actually believe the task was enjoyable, because a small incentive provides insufficient external justification for the lie, leaving them to reduce the resulting discomfort by aligning their attitude with their behavior. Festinger and Carlsmith found exactly this inverse relationship between incentive and attitude change, providing striking support for dissonance theory and overturning reinforcement-based predictions that larger rewards produce more attitude change.