In the last two weeks, five University students have reported receiving phone calls from someone impersonating a psychological researcher, causing the psychology department to implement new procedures for its researchers who contact study participants by telephone.
Under the new procedures, if a researcher wants to contact a prospective study participant by phone, he or she must e-mail the student one day in advance. These e-mail messages contain experiment protocol numbers, which callers must be prepared to verify. The numbers can also be verified at the psychology department office in 131 Straub Hall.
“We took it pretty seriously,” said acting psychology department head Lou Moses. “We wanted to set some procedures in place that would help students distinguish between the real and the phony ones.”
While details vary in the five student reports, Human Subjects Coordinator Lisa Cromer said common tricks of the “mystery caller” include keeping people on the line for up to 40 minutes, asking inappropriate personal questions, offering to pay people $400 or $500 for a two-hour study and calling as late as 11:30 p.m.
In one call, the caller identified his supervisor as Dr. Suiter, Cromer said. There is no Dr. Suiter in the University psychology department or in any other department at the University.
“It’s very hard to figure out what the person’s motivation would be in doing this,” Moses said.
Legitimate researchers never call late at night or pay study participants more than $7 to $10 per hour, Cromer said.
Cromer said most of the affected students are not psychology majors, although they are mostly female.
“It’s not just a psychology problem,” Cromer said. “It’s a campus-wide problem.”
All psychology faculty, as well as graduate and undergraduate students who perform research under the supervision of faculty members, have been informed of the situation.
“People are kind of surprised and disturbed that this is going on,” Moses said. “It’s a disturbing thing for the students who are receiving these calls, and it has the potential to negatively affect the legitimate research that’s actually going on in the psychology department.”
One relief for the department, Cromer said, was that the caller does not seem to have infiltrated the security of the Human Subjects Pool Web site, which students in psychology and linguistics classes use to sign up to participate in studies for class credit.
“He seems to be using the phone book, basically,” Cromer said.
The psychology department dealt with similar difficulties in April when a man was arrested for impersonating a psychology professor. Moses said the man derailed a student’s graduation plan by promising her she could do her honors research project in his nonexistent lab.
Despite that, Moses said incidents like this have not happened before during his 13 years with the psychology department.
“Very likely, it’s just a random occurrence,” Moses said.
Cromer dismissed the possibility that the calls could be perpetrated by someone inside the psychology department because of the caller’s transparent tactics and ignorance of department policies.
“Is it a research assistant having some fun? I think that’s highly improbable,” Cromer said.
The Institutional Review Board must approve every study involving human subjects that takes place at the University. Juliana Kyrk, Institutional Review Board program officer for the Office for the Protection of Human Subjects, said that about one third of the University’s studies involving human subjects come from the psychology department.
Other departments conducting studies with human subjects include political science, human physiology, anthropology, geography and the College of Education.
Kyrk said all study participants must be told the following before they participate: who is doing the research, what the research involves, how long the study will last, how confidentiality will be maintained, who to contact with questions about the study, the rights provided by the Institutional Review Board, that participation in the study is voluntary and that they may refuse to participate in the study.
“It must be voluntary and noncoercive,” Kyrk said. “The participant always has the right to discontinue participation at any time.”
Cromer said that if a student who is not currently enrolled in classes that are part of the Human Subjects Pool or if that student has not signed up to participate in one of the paid psychological studies advertised in campus locations receives a phone call about a psychological study, he or she is probably being contacted in error. She recommended requesting the caller’s phone number and calling back the next day to ensure that the study is legitimate. Moses also recommended writing down anything that appears on a phone’s caller ID.
Moses said any students receiving phone calls that sound inappropriate from someone posing as a psychological researcher should contact him (346-4918 or [email protected]) or the Department of Public Safety (346-6666).

Contact the business, science and technology reporter at [email protected]