Bogus pipeline technology
The Bogus pipeline technique is a method used in psychology and empirical social research to increase the number of honest answers to sensitive questions . The respondents are connected to a kind of lie detector and convinced by a trick that this machine will show the honest answer anyway. The respondents answer much more honestly than people who believe they can lie undetected .
history
The Bogus pipeline technique was first scientifically applied in 1967 by the psychologist Harold Sigall, then at the University of Rochester . He asked 60 white students about their attitudes and opinions about African Americans , half of them also using the Bogus pipeline technique. In this group, the strength of negative prejudices was significantly higher than in the control group . However, the subjects claimed they would have given the same answers even without the Bogus pipeline control.
Alexander and Fisher (2003, see web links) asked men and women about the number of their previous sex partners and found a significantly higher number in women with Bogus pipeline control than with open-ended answers.
A variant: a group of teenagers was shown a seemingly scientific film, according to which one could discover their smoking habits through a saliva analysis. A saliva sample was taken from them and then asked about their smoking habits. Here, too, the admitted consumption was significantly higher than without the Bogus pipeline technology.
literature
- E. Jones, H. Sigall: The Bogus Pipeline: A new paradigm for measuring affect and attitude. In: Psychological Bulletin. Volume 76, No. 5, 1971, pp. 349-364.
- NJ Roese, DW Jamieson: Twenty years of bogus pipeline research: A critical review and meta-analysis. In: Psychological Bulletin. Volume 114, 1993, pp. 363-375. (abstract)
- S. Kassin, S. Fein, HR Markus: Social Psychology. 7th edition. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA 2008, ISBN 978-0-618-86846-9 .
Web links
- The experiment - all just for show. ( Memento from August 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) NZZ article with a photo of Sigall's original machine
- Michele G. Alexander, Terri D. Fisher: Truth and consequences: using the bogus pipeline to examine sex differences in self-reported sexuality. In: The Journal of Sex Research. Vol. 40, 2003.