Deception in directed forgetting experiments: Participants are mostly unconcerned

Deceptive methodologies are commonly used in experimental psychological research, including in basic cognitive psychology research. That being said, deception as an ethical practice is most frequently discussed in the context of how deception is used in social psychological research. In the current article we discuss the use of a common deceptive practice in memory research, namely the directed forgetting paradigm. In this paradigm participants are deceived by being informed that they should, in a study phase, remember some information and forget other information. However, at the test the participants are then required to remember all the information learned, even that information they were ostensibly meant to forget. Across seven experiments over slightly more than 2 years we have queried 309 participants about the ethics of deception in directed forgetting and related experiments, after they themselves had participated in the studies. We present the results of these queries in support of the notion that participants are generally not opposed to the use of deception in directed forgetting research. Beyond this, we discuss potential ethical concerns, the importance of minority opinions concerning deception, how debriefing should occur, and the generalizability of our conclusions.