Ethics in Psychology Don’t do bad stuff

What is Ethics? In the broad philosophical sense, ethics is determining of right and wrong conduct. In medicine, including psychology, ethics is the preserving of the welfare and dignity of research participants, both animal and human. This means that while gathering information on severe anxiety by putting a loaded gun to a patient’s head, or studying marital conflict by telling a person that their spouse in unfaithful, this creates harm, and is therefore unethical and illegal.

Alternatives To the previous two scenarios, a researcher may study anxiety by having a participant approach a feared (but ultimately harmless) animal. Marital strife is often observed by videotaping couples who are having issues. This methods do not cause unnecessary harm in patients and still provide valuable data.

Obligations of Psychologists Psychologists take their responsibilities very seriously (and not just because they don’t want to get sued). They are sure to explain every aspect of an experiment that may cause a participant to want to withdraw. They want to insure that all participation is entirely voluntary. While it may be unfortunate to lose a potential participant, it’s much better than the alternative.

What about experiments that require surprise? If psychologists require genuine reactions from participants, it wouldn’t work very well if they described every aspect to the subject. For instance, if reaction to an “insult” was required to be genuine, you couldn’t tell them that they were about to be insulted. Instead, guidelines require psychologists to “debrief”, or explain, all information relevant to the experiment as soon as the study ends.

Institutional Review Board In the United States, as well as Canada and several other countries, any research that may use human participants must go before an institutional review board (IRB). If an experiment has the potential to cause discomfort to its subjects, the IRB members weigh its potential value to humanity against this. If the cons outweigh the pros, the research is forbidden.

Ethics and Animal Experimentation

What about animals? Animals are often used in psychological and medical research, with about 7 to 8% of modern psychological experiments utilizing them. Experiments that would be hard or unethical with humans, such as looking into social isolation, are more easily performed on animals. While the ethics might be more lax than with humans, animals today are still treated humanely. This is partly due to the moral rightness of it: it is bad to harm animals. However, from a more pragmatic approach, harming or depriving animals adds confounding variables to experiments. For instance, if you are trying to determine if a rat will respond to food rewards, you could starve it to make it more likely to seek the food. However, is it responding due to the experiment, or starvation?

Infamous Psychology Experiments The “Monster Study” (1939): An experiment on stuttering and speech development conducted on orphans by Wendell Johnson. Half of the children received positive speech therapy, and were complimented on their ability. The other half received negative speech therapy, and were consistently belittled for their speech imperfections. After the six months, the negative group developed lifelong problems with speech and stuttering, even if they were initially present.

Infamous Psychology Experiments Landis Facial Expressions Experiment (1924): Run by Carney Landis, this experiment was designed to see if people had a common set of facial expressions. Subjects had their faces painted with black lines, and then were subjected to various stimuli, such as ammonia (strong smell), pornography, and touching frogs. However, the final step required them to behead a live rat. Fully a third agreed to do this, and had no medical practice on how to do it humanely. While this didn’t prove if people had shared facial expressions, it did show that many people were willing to do extreme things when asked.

Infamous Psychology Experiments Little Albert (1920): Created by John Watson, father of Behaviorism, Little Albert was a 9 month baby chose from a hospital by Watson. Albert was exposed to white rats, white bunnies, and white cloth, and was allowed to interact with them. Initially he showed no fear or concern regarding these objects. However, Watson and his team began striking a steel bar with a hammer behind Albert’s back when he reached out to touch them. This scared the infant, and after several times of this, began to experience fear at the mere sight of the white objects, and other white objects in general. Worst of all, Watson was unable to desensitize, or remove, Albert’s fear before he left the hospital and program.

Infamous Psychology Experiments Learned Helplessness (1965): Psychologists Mark Seligman and Steve Maier conducted an experiment in which three groups of dogs were placed in harnesses. The first group were released from the harnesses after a period of time, without harm. The second group were harnessed together and were shocked, but could end the shock by pressing a lever. The third group were also shocked, but their lever did not work, and the shocks would last for random amounts of time. The third groups learned that they could not avoid the shocks, and became depressed. In a later experiment, the third group were put into shallow boxes and were shocked. The dogs only had to hop out of the box to avoid the shock, but due to the learned helplessness, did not attempt to do so.