ABSTRACT
Researchers have long recognized the difficulties of experiments employing human subjects. Criticisms of traditional experiments have been made on moral, methodological, and philosophical grounds, although they have made little real impact upon the practice of the experimental analysis of human action. Laboratory experiments are held to maximize on internal validity: the isolation and control of the experiment enables the investigator to make accurate judgements about causality. The ubiquitous complaint about experiments concerns the 'artificiality' of studying human action in laboratory settings. The traditional response to the 'interaction paradoxes' of the laboratory experiment is the deception experiment, in which a 'cover story' is provided to disguise the real point and purpose of the experiment. The main point of the deception experiment is to eliminate or alleviate contaminating art factual variables. In consequence the social psychological dimensions constitutive of psychological therapy tend to be eliminated or attenuated in control groups.
