Is Conventional Debriefing Adequate? An Ethical Issue in Consumer Research

Abstract

Issues relating to ethics are infrequently addressed in the marketing literature. One area in which there might be ethical concerns is debriefing. In an experiment, when false information is provided by the researcher to subjects, those false beliefs can persist despite conventional debriefing. The persistence of false beliefs has ethical implications, of which consumer researchers should be aware. Anexplicit debriefing involving a formal discussion of the belief perseverance phenomenon is proposed as an alternative to conventional approaches. This is tested in three separate studies, including a partial replication of Ross, Lepper, and Hubbard (1975) as well as two extensions to marketing situations. Implications for corrective advertising are also discussed.