The exercises in this section on ethics are designed to help you think about the issues that we are discussing and to formulate some opinions. In general, there are no wrong or right answers but you need to give reasons for your answers.
3.75 How can we obtain informed consent?
A researcher suspects that traditional religious beliefs tend to be associated with an authoritarian personality. She prepares a questionnaire that measures authoritarian tendencies and also asks many religious questions. Write a description of the purpose of this research to be read by subjects in order to obtain their informed consent. You must balance the conflicting goals of not deceiving the subjects as to what the questionnaire will tell about them and of not biasing the sample by scaring off religious people.