Ethical Considerations in Research on Coached Malingering

This article discusses ethical considerations for research on coached malingering on psychological tests. A fundamental tension exists between the desire of clinicians to know the extent to which commonly used tests such as the MMPI-2 are vulnerable to coached faking and the danger that such information will be used to improve the success of coached malingerers. Although it is important to make clinicians aware of a test's susceptibility to faking, care should be taken not to reveal details of successful coaching strategies. Several options for evaluating the balance between the ethical requirement to protect the integrity of psychological tests and the need for clinicians to know the vulnerability of the test to coached malingering are reviewed.