Compare methods

	Cover Story Deception	Induced Compliance Paradigm
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1959	1959
Originator	Classic experimental social psychology	Leon Festinger & James Carlsmith
Type	Methodological design controlling participant expectations	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.	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	Forced Compliance Paradigm, Counter-attitudinal Advocacy Paradigm, Festinger-Carlsmith Paradigm
Related	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 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.