Confronta i metodi

	Cover Story Deception	Confederate Paradigm
Campo	Psicologia sociale	Psicologia sociale
Famiglia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Anno di origine	1959	1956
Ideatore	Classic experimental social psychology	Classic social psychology (Asch, Milgram, Latane and others)
Tipo	Methodological design controlling participant expectations	Methodological design using trained accomplices
Fonte seminale	Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203-210.	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.
Alias	Deception Design, Cover Story Method, Experimental Deception	Experimental Accomplice Method, Stooge Paradigm, Trained Confederate Design
Correlati	3	3
Sintesi	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 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.