Demand characteristics

From PsychWiki - A Collaborative Psychology Wiki

The concept of demand characteristics was proposed by Martin Orne (1962) to explain high rates of compliance with experimenters. He believed that participants are sensitive to demand characteristics, cues in the study which enable them to discover the experimental hypotheses, and that they will try to confirm experimental hypotheses out of a desire to further science. However, Kruglanski (1975) found that subjects typically do not know the hypotheses and when they do, they often attempt to confound the experimental hypothesis (e.g., act less aggressively if aware that research is on aggression). Berkowitz and Donnerstein (1982) believed that a greater threat to internal validity is participants' motivation to look good to the researcher.

---

◄ Back to Research Tools mainpage