Compare methods

	Cover Story Deception	Bogus Pipeline	Confederate 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	1959	1971	1956	1959
Originator	Classic experimental social psychology	Edward Jones & Harold Sigall	Classic social psychology (Asch, Milgram, Latane and others)	Leon Festinger & James Carlsmith
Type	Methodological design controlling participant expectations	Methodological technique to reduce social-desirability bias	Methodological design using trained accomplices	Experimental paradigm for cognitive dissonance
Seminal source	Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203-210.	Jones, E. E., & Sigall, H. (1971). The bogus pipeline: A new paradigm for measuring affect and attitude. Psychological Bulletin, 76(5), 349-364.	Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 70(9), 1-70.	Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203-210.
Aliases	Deception Design, Cover Story Method, Experimental Deception	Bogus Pipeline Procedure, Fake Lie Detector Method, Pipeline-to-the-Truth Technique	Experimental Accomplice Method, Stooge Paradigm, Trained Confederate Design	Forced Compliance Paradigm, Counter-attitudinal Advocacy Paradigm, Festinger-Carlsmith Paradigm
Related	3	3	3	3
Summary	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 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.	The confederate paradigm is a foundational methodological design in social psychology in which trained accomplices -- people who appear to be ordinary participants or bystanders but are actually part of the research team -- enact scripted behavior to create controlled social situations. By standardizing what confederates do, researchers can manipulate the social environment with precision while keeping the naive participant convinced the situation is real. Confederates have been the linchpin of many landmark studies: the unanimous wrong majority in Asch's conformity work, the passive bystanders in Latane and Darley's helping experiments, the learner in Milgram's obedience studies, and partners in countless interaction studies. The paradigm allows experimental control over otherwise uncontrollable social stimuli, making it possible to draw causal conclusions about how others' behavior shapes our own.	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.