A qualitative study of perception of a dishonesty experiment

We conducted focus groups with participants of a laboratory experiment on cheating with the aim to describe and structure participants’ lived experience with the experiment and to compare their perceptions with experimenters’ expectations. Our results suggest that participants often perceive both control and experimental conditions differently than intended by an experimenter. For example, the participants’ decisions may be affected by feeling that they have to make a choice and do not have the opportunity to leave the experimental situation; by not believing in the anonymity of the experiment, by misunderstanding of random processes, or by other considerations other than the ethicality, for example by how entertaining or effortful is the chosen course of action. Our results underscore how difficult it is to achieve internal validity even in laboratory research. We conclude that the laboratory research of dishonesty would be improved by taking into account different perceived frames of experimental designs.