Bogus Pipeline

Definition

If you ask a person about their sexual activity, illicit drug use, or prejudices against certain others, you may not get a straight answer. Embarrassment, fear of legal repercussions, or a simple desire to look good can create distortions in responses to such questions. Social psychologists have developed many research techniques to get more accurate responses to survey questions. Contemporary implicit measurement techniques, such as the Implicit Association Test, use computer assessment of millisecond-level differences in response time to sidestep respondents' strategic efforts at self-presentation. Much earlier, social psychologists used a more primitive method. The bogus pipeline technique, pioneered in the early 1970s, was based on the idea that people might give truer responses if they feared getting caught in the act of lying. The ...