Confederates

Benefits and Risks of Confederates

The use of confederates offers several risks and benefits. First, confederates permit researchers to better understand the behaviors of another individual through the use of the same recruitment pool. Researchers do not have to expend additional time and resources to locate confederates; rather, the researcher can assign different roles based on those recruited. Confederates are also of special use when assessing an unusual behavior. Researchers may want to understand the reactive behaviors of an individual through observation; therefore, confederates provide the somewhat real-life depiction of an individual exhibiting an unusual behavior that may elicit a particular response from the other participant involved.

Although confederates offer several benefits to researchers, they contain various risks. If aware of the researcher’s intentions, the confederate can overplay a role to elicit a desired response from the participant. Reverting to a previous example, if researchers were interested in different types of culture shock and hypothesize that college students are more likely to feel uncomfortable in new situations, aware of the hypothesis, the confederate may amplify the behaviors (beyond the norm) requested to try and make the participant feel uncomfortable. Such knowledge taints the data of the study. Use of confederates should set up a standard set of expectations about behavior to which the confederate should conform.

Another risk of confederates in research is if their role is heavily reliant on a particular nonverbal behavior. Confederates may be asked to elicit a nonverbal behavior such as an act of surprise; however, requiring a nonverbal behavior could indicate a lack of sincerity and might be interpreted as counterfeit to the participant observed. In another sense, confederates must become highly skilled actors if the researcher requires a strict list of nonverbal behaviors within the observation. The artificial behaviors might deter researchers from using confederates for observational studies.

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