No evidence that post-experiment beliefs about deception cause participants to overreport suspicion

Many experiments in psychology involve deceiving participants about aspects of the study. Researchers who employ deception sometimes administer post-experiment suspicion probes and exclude participants from analysis if their responses indicate that they were not successfully deceived. However, several studies have found that their suspicious participants behave as if they were deceived as intended. One explanation is that participants infer that they were deceived upon being presented with a suspicion probe, which biases them to overreport being suspicious. We tested whether post-experiment beliefs about deception can indeed induce such biases by manipulating whether we admitted to using deception before administering suspicion probes. Admitting to deception did not increase the amount of suspicion reported (Experiment 1), nor did the content of participants’ suspicions reflect the content of our admission (Experiment 2). Results suggest that it is unlikely that suspicion probes ‘tip off’ participants in a way that causes them to overreport suspicion.