> the actual experiments failed to build trust in the experimentees Psychological experiments involve trickery very often, because they need test subjects to b

> the actual experiments failed to build trust in the experimentees Psychological experiments involve trickery very often, because they need test subjects to be unaware of what experiments is trying to measure. I expect the most of subjects of psychological experiments to know this because they heard of other experiments. So I wouldn't expect that the trust building will change anything. This particular experiment with a strange proposition to switch cups probably forces subjects to think what is happening, they inevitably form some hypotheses and run with them. I wouldn't believe that the results has something with a regret before I've read the research paper and have found there what researches did to ensure that they measured regret avoidance and not the ability of a subject to simulate their immunity to manipulations (if they thought that experiment tried to measure their resolve by coercing them to switch...). Normally there is a post-experiment interview where researcher could try to learn the reasoning behind decisions of a test subject, but in this case a direct answer probably will not do. Though if "untrustworthy" researchers tricked test subject so they would get a reward in any case, then subjects would be happy and proud, and probably they would love to explain their "winning logic", even (or maybe especially) if they were mistaken about goals of experiment. It would be like researchers were too smart by half when devising the game and so they lost $5. I personally would feel an urge to brag about my "superior" thought process. But in any case we need the original paper to learn how it was done and could we believe the interpretation of the experimental data.