17 Ethics
🏢 Lab class
Chapter 4 in Beth’s book lays out the ethical principles that psychological research should adhere to. Beth’s book is written for a US audience, so it focuses on the American Psychological Association’s guidelines. The principles in the UK are very similar, but if you’re interested in the specific UK guidelines from the British Psychological Society (BPS), you can find them on the BPS guidelines and documents page.
One example discussed in the chapter is Milgram’s research into obedience. Beth mentions Perry’s (2013) book, but note that a later publication by Turowetz & Hollander (2018) questioned some of Perry’s conclusions. If you’d like to read more about Milgram’s research, you might also be interested in a meta-analysis by Haslam et al. (2014).
As Beth discusses, studies like Milgram’s (or Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, for that matter) involve a goal conflict: on the one hand, they might lead to important insights; on the other hand, they violate ethical principles. While attempts have been made to make Milgram’s study less ethically questionable (Burger, 2009), Miller (2009) has argued that the stress and coercion were perhaps key ingredients to Milgram’s experiment.
The Stanford prison experiment has also been criticised on methodological grounds. Based on archival material, Le Texier (2019) argued that the guards were encouraged by the researchers to behave harshly, which casts doubt on the claim that their behaviour arose spontaneously from the situation.
A frequent issue in psychological research is deception. It is often necessary to mislead participants to some degree, because some phenomena could not be studied if participants knew they were being studied. So, when is deception appropriate and when is it inappropriate? The BPS sets out several conditions, and one key test is how participants are likely to react when the deception is revealed. The BPS Code of Human Research Ethics states:
Deception or covert collection of data should only take place where it is essential to achieve the research results required, where there are no alternatives, where the research objective has strong scientific merit and where there is an appropriate risk management and harm alleviation strategy.
The experience of deception in psychological research may have the potential to cause distress and harm and can make the recipients cynical about the activities and attitudes of psychologists. However, since there are very many psychological processes that are modifiable by individuals if they are aware that they are being studied, stating the research focus to a participant in advance of the collection of data would make some psychological research impossible. There is a difference between withholding some of the details of the hypothesis under test and deliberately falsely informing the participants of the purpose of the research, especially if the information given implies a more benign topic of study than is in fact the case.
This Code of Human Research Ethics expects all psychologists to seek to supply as full information as possible to those taking part in their research, recognising that providing all of that information at the start of a person’s participation may not be possible for methodological reasons. If the reaction of participants when deception is revealed later in their participation is likely to lead to discomfort, anger or objections from the participants then the deception is inappropriate. If a proposed research study involves deception, it should be designed in such a way that it protects the dignity and autonomy of the participants.