Ethics…

Ethics. We’ve all heard of them and all have our own opinions on them. The British Psychological Society (BPS) have come up with code of conduct (1985), which is basically a list of ethical guidelines to consider when carrying out research. However they have the final say so on whether or not a research project is carried out. So what do they take into consideration when giving the final say so? The BPS has set four ethical principles to think about when conducting research:

• Ø Respect – psychologists should value a person’s worth and dignity
• Ø Competence – psychologists remain professional in their work
• Ø Responsibility – psychologists value their responsibility to the scientific community, their participant/clients and avoid causing harm to their participants/clients
• Ø Integrity – psychologists value accuracy, truth and fairness

Whenever anyone mentions ethics i’m sure I can speak for most people when I say that Milgram’s obedience study (1961) springs straight to mind. And rightfully so… It was only after Milgrams study that the BPS brought in the code of conduct and it is used so widely as an example of poor ethical consideration that it is possibly the most famous psychological piece of research to have ever been carried out. But was Milgram so ethically wrong? A lot of people say yes straight away but if we get down to the nitty gritty and look at the facts in fact his study wasn’t that much more ethically wrong than Asch’s study into conformity. Did Milgram seek ethical approval before carrying out his study? Well yes! In fact the psychologist he approached about it told him to go ahead and do it because they believed that no-one would administer a single shock. Did Milgram gather informed consent? Well no, but does any study? Doesn’t every study have to deceive their participants otherwise the results may not be valid?  Did Milgram give his participants the right to withdraw? Yes he did, he told participants at the beginning of the study that they could leave at any time they wish, if participants asked three times to leave the study then they could, Milgram used prods to keep the participant there because that was what he was investigating. And there’s the big argument that Milgram did not protect his participants from harm. But  84% of participants said they felt glad to have taken part in the study, in fact one participant wrote to Milgram a few years later thanking him for letting him take part. Then finally what about debriefing? Well Milgram was BIG on this, he was debriefing his participants for years. So with all this in consideration was Milgrams study so ethically wrong? I think not but that’s just my opinion.

However studies like Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment (1971) did cause it’s participants psychological and in some cases physical harm. Had Zimbardo approached a board of ethics today with this study he would have been turned down straight away. With this in mind it seems that Ethics are there for a very good reason, to stop research being carried out that could potentially harm the well-being of participants. If there was no code of conduct to consider all sorts of research could be carried out which may in fact put people off participating in experiment’s knowing that there is the potential for harm to be brought to them. With the code of conduct there, people feel safer to participate in experiments and it stops researchers having free reign over how to carry out experiments.