Subjects in Psychology Research May Not Be Honest

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One of the big problems in both psychiatric and psychological research that I have written about extensively is the tendency of researchers to think that their subjects are usually being truthful, especially when it comes to things like family dysfunction, marital maladjustment, and child abuse.

Most people who know that people often are not truthful about these and other matters think it’s mostly a matter of personal shame and embarrassment, whereas I think that, while that can be a substantial part of the phenomenon, the lies can also be about protecting the reputation of their families of origin.

We, of course, have very little truly objective research data in the fields of psychology and psychiatry because:

1. We can’t read minds.
2. People are good actors, leading to falsehoods in the researchers' observations.
3. People not only lie to others but to themselves as well. This is part of the “willful blindness” characteristic of groupthink, which we need in order to maintain group cohesion within kin and ethnic groups. Logic evolved not to reach the truth but to justify group norms, as Gregg Henriques has pointed out.

Of course, people are less than honest about a variety of other things besides family dysfunction. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of the book, Everybody Lies, stated:

People lie about how many drinks they had on the way home. They lie about how often they go to the gym, how much those new shoes cost, whether they read that last book. They call in sick when they’re not…They say they’re happy when they’re in the dumps. They say they like women when they really like men…People lie to their friends. They lie to their kids. They lie to parents. They lie to doctors…They lie to themselves. And they damn sure lie to surveys.

Big Data From the Internet Can Expose Interesting Truths

Stephens-Davidowitz’s book discussed one way we can get around this. We now have "big data" that can monitor the internet sites we visit and the questions we have in our minds. People have little incentive to lie in the context of a Google search because no one they know will be aware of what they are doing when they do, say, a search on Pornhub for lesbian sex. The author referred to the internet as a “digital truth serum.”

Stephens-Davidowitz discussed how this data helps us spot patterns of human thinking and behavior as well as predict how one variable will affect another. This data contains many surprises. For example, if you check into what follows most often when you type in “it’s normal to want to kill…” the most common inquiry is “my family.”

Now, of course, even with big data, there are some questions that cannot be clarified, and the author gives us a wonderful discussion of some of the hazards of using it to draw conclusions. I highly recommend the book.