The Subject-Experimenter Contract: A Reexamination of Subject Pool Contamination

Abstract

We conducted three experiments to investigate: (a) the extent to which student research participants believe they will disclose details of their experiences, (b) how much subjects actually will disclose immediately following a request not to reveal information, and (c) how much they will disclose after a 2-week interval. Disclosure rates increased across the experiments. In the first experiment, one fifth of the subjects indicated that they probably would not preserve confidentiality, whether or not they believed it was important to do so. In the second experiment, signing a pledge not to discuss the experiment resulted in less disclosure, but over one third of the subjects revealed information to a confederate. In the third experiment, promising students anonymity increased disclosure; 85% of the subjects disclosed information. The results indicate that failure to heed requests for confidentiality may be a widespread problem in college subject pools.