The ethical rights of human
participants in psychological research are protected by ethical guidelines,
though ultimately these are not always successful. Participants should give
their voluntary informed consent before taking part in an experiment. They
should also be told that they have the right to withdraw at any time without
giving a reason. At the end of the experiment, there should be a debriefing
period in which the experiment is discussed fully. Another safeguard is
confidentiality, with no information about individual participants being
divulged. Privacy and protection from psychological and physical harm are
critical. Professional organisations such as the British Psychological Society
publish detailed ethical guidelines, and most research institutions have
ethical committees. Ethical guidelines focus mainly on protection of the
participants. However, it is important with socially sensitive research to
consider the protection of groups to which the participants belong and those
closely associated with the participants. These broader social issues need to
be considered with respect to the research question selected, the conduct of
the research, the institutional context, and the interpretation and application
of research findings. The choice of research question reflects the researcher’s
assumptions and may bias the research process from the outset. The
institutional context may make the participants feel powerless, or those
running the organisation in which the research takes place may misuse the
findings. The findings of socially sensitive research may be applied in dubious
ways not anticipated by the researcher, or the research may be used to justify
new forms of social control.
Socially sensitive research
On the positive side, socially
sensitive research may provide useful information to help minority groups, as
in the case of eyewitness testimony. In addition, ethical committees do
frequently reject research with potentially sensitive social consequences.
Researchers cannot generally be expected to foresee what they will find or how
others will use such findings. However, the findings of socially sensitive
research have been used to justify new (and often unwarranted) forms of social
control. In the past, psychologists have advocated sterilisation for
undesirable groups of potential parents, and more recently behaviourists have
suggested that psychological research can be applied to social control. Such
control is exerted through behavioural forms of therapy for mental disorders. Race-related research has been defended on
the grounds that it is ethically indefensible to refrain from acquiring such
knowledge and making it available to society. An important counter-argument is
the fact that such findings may be based on faulty research methods and are
used in unacceptable ways. In addition, race-related research on intelligence
in the United States is almost meaningless, because black and white people do
not form distinct biological groups. (Link to Gould)
The ethics of animal research are less clear in psychology
than in medicine. Animals are used in experiments because some procedures would
not be permissible with humans, either those involving physical harm or social
deprivation. It is easier to use animals, especially to study the effects of
heredity, because they reproduce over much shorter time periods than humans,
and because it is easier to understand their behaviour. However, animal
research can be criticized because it is manifest Speciesism. Speciesism refers to the discrimination and
exploitation of another species based on the fact that it is different from our
own. Speciesism can be opposed on the basis that it resembles racism and
sexism, and, like these “isms”, discriminates unjustly against individuals on
irrelevant grounds. (Link to Gardner and Gardner)
Michael W.Eysenck & Cara Flanagan, 2001, Psychology for A2 level, Psychology Press, ISBN 1-84169-251-4 (Highly recommended text for broad overview of psychology, written in an easy to understand style)