In psychological studies, a confederate is a person who collaborates with the experimenter and pretends to be a participant. A confederate’s main task is to manipulate responses in order to study the unswayed reactions of the actual participants during controlled assessments. Social psychology focuses significantly on the functionality of confederates in deception studies involving compliance, adherence, and group behavior. Ethical restraints mandate that confederates debrief participants afterwards to clarify the nature of the deception. Milgram’s compliance experiment is a classic study example where confederates played the role of the learner while the participant’s response to an authority figure was the true focus.
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