Deception in Research Design

Medical Research and Placebos

Some academic fields have independently elected to prohibit the use of deception altogether. Experimental economists, for instance, generally refrain from using it and are often outspoken critics. In contrast, medicine and psychology have frequently used deceptive techniques in the past and continue to employ such techniques today. In medical research, deception usually takes the form of placebo studies. Placebo studies test the effectiveness of medications and medical therapies by comparing the outcome of an experimental group given a medical treatment to a group given a pharmacologically ineffective placebo treatment. The purpose of the placebo is to make participants in the control group believe that they are receiving a medical treatment, even though they are not.

There is a consensus among medical researchers, federal agencies, and review boards that the placebo-controlled study is the most effective means [Page 269]of testing new treatments and therapies. However, modern ethical codes of medical research mandate that when an effective treatment for a condition is available, it cannot be withheld from research participants, even if they consent to placement in a placebo group. These ethical codes of conduct were partly established in response to historical cases of ethical misconduct involving the use of deception, such as in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study initiated in 1931.

Conducted by the Public Health Service to track the progression of untreated syphilis, the study followed the lives of hundreds of black men who had contracted the disease. In the absence of ethical regulations at the time, researchers continued to observe the catastrophic effects of the disease, even after a successful treatment (penicillin) was discovered in 1943. While obvious instances of abuse like this would be forbidden by ethical codes today, there is disagreement in some current medical studies about whether effective therapies exist and if they should be used in place of the placebos currently administered.

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