ABSTRACT
One of the foundational texts of detective fiction, and a classic that continues to be revered, is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” The texts prepared by experimenters may possess the purity of form and content necessary for the experimental results to be unambiguous, but it is hard to resist the impression that textual products are hardly like the actual literary stories people read. Literary stories are also well-suited to providing vivid, emotionally charged accounts of individual suffering, which is important because such accounts are highly effective in raising public awareness of large-scale misery, particularly in comparison with statistical or numerical data, on which animal welfare campaigns often rely. Since deception in psychological experiments is prima facie a breach of trust, the researchers usually try to remedy that fault by informing the subjects immediately after the experiment is finished about its true purpose and by explaining why they had to be deceived.
