Affective Debriefing in Experimental Consumer Research Employing Deception

This research proposes and finds that after exposure to experimental deception, typical (i.e., cognitive) debriefing procedures are insufficient to undo participants’ experimentally induced false impressions. Affect-based debriefing (i.e., offering stimulus-related information of opposite valence to that employed in the study) is introduced as an effective remedy for this problem.