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CHAPTER 3: Ethical Issues in the Conduct of Psychological Research 77FIGURE 3.7An informative debriefing is critical in ensuring that research participants have a good experience.their participation. Researchers should provide opportunities for participants tolearn more about their particular contribution to the research study and to feelmore personally involved in the scientific process (see Figure 3.7). Followinga debriefing, participants in the Kassin and Kiechel (1996) experiment on falseconfessions reported they found the study meaningful and thought their owncontribution to the research was valuable.Debriefing provides an opportunity for participants to learn more about theirspecific performance in the study and about research in general. For instance,participants can learn that their individual performance in a study may reflecttheir abilities, but also situational factors such as what the researcher askedthem to do and the conditions of testing. Because the educational value of participationin psychological research is used to justify the use of large numbers ofvolunteers from introductory psychology classes, researchers who test collegestudents have an important obligation to ensure that research participation isan educational experience. Classroom instructors have sometimes built on theeducational foundation of the debriefing and asked their students to reflect ontheir research experience by writing brief reports describing details about thestudy’s purpose, the techniques used, and the significance of the research forunderstanding behavior. An evaluation of one such procedure showed that studentswho wrote reports were more satisfied with their research experience andthey gained a greater overall educational benefit from it than did students whodid not write reports (Richardson, Pegalis, & Britton, 1992).Debriefing helps researchers learn how participants viewed the proceduresin the study. A researcher may want to find out whether participants perceived