A topic that I have mentioned before is the possibility of participants lying. This is a very important issue that researchers must face when dealing with human subjects, and it can have severe consequences on the results of the study. Through the various interviews, surveys, and self-reports, we often rely on the information given to us by the participants. It is very important to know about the participants' prior behavior in order to guage the effects of our experiment on them. Additionally, we hope that we can trust the participants' reports during the experiment so that we can have subjective information about the experiment. This information is analyzed along all of the other data that we collect in the study in order to fully evaluate the experimental effects.
However, the largest question is: how can we trust our participants? How do we know that the participants aren't lying, that they aren't exaggerating or changing their answers so that they seem like a "better" participant (although the best participant is the honest one)?
We cannot! The simple answer is that scientists just have to take their word for it. Any lies or exaggerations due significantly impact the results of the study, which is unfortunate. However, human self-reports are extremely important in this sort of study, so we must be able to work around potential fallacy. I'll leave it up to the senior researchers to figure out how to make their evaluation flexible enough to account for data that is incorrect.
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