Chapter 3: Ethics in Research

Question 1

Obedience experiments (Milgram’s)

Answer 1

A series of famous experiments conducted during the 1960s by Stanley Milgrim, a psychologist from Yale University, testing subjects’ willingness to cause pain to another person if instructed to do so

Question 2

Nuremberg war crime trials

Answer 2

Trials held in Nuremberg, Germany, in the years following World War II, in which the former leaders of Nazi Germany were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity; frequently considered the frist trials for people accused of genocide

Question 3

Tuskagee syphilis study

Answer 3

Research study conducted by a branch of the U.S. government, lasting for roughly 50 years (ending in the 1970s), in which a sample of African American men diagnosed with syphilis were deliberately left untreated, without their knowledge, to learn about the lifetime course of the disease

Question 4

Belmont Report

Answer 4

Report in 1979 of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research stipulating three basic ethical principles for the protection of human subjects: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice

Question 5

Respect for person

Answer 5

In human subjects, ethics discussions, treating persons as autonomous agents, and protecting those with diminished autonomy

Question 6

Beneficence

Answer 6

Minimizing possible harms and maximizing benefits

Question 7

Justice

Answer 7

As used in human research ethics discussions, distributing benefits and risks of research fairly

Question 8

Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects

Answer 8

Federal regulations codifying basic principles for conducting research on human subjects; used as the basis for professional organizations’ guidelines

Question 9

Institutional review board (IRB)

Answer 9

A group of organizational and community representatives requried by federal law to review the ethical issues in all proposed research that is federally funded, incolves human subjects, or has any potential for harm to subjects

Question 10

Office for Protection From Research Risks, National Institutes of Health

Answer 10

Federal agency that monitors institutional review boards (IRBs)

Question 11

Debriefing

Answer 11

A researcher’s informing subjects after an experiment about the experiment’s purposes and methods and evaluating subjects’ personalreactions to the experiment

Question 12

Prison simulation study (Zimbardo’s)

Answer 12

Famous study fromt he early 1970s, organized by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, demonstrating the willingness of average college students quickly to become harsh disciplinarians when put int he role of (simulated) prison guards over other studetns, usually interpreted as demonstrating an easy human readiness to become cruel

Question 13

Tearoom Trade

Answer 13

Book by Laud Humphrey’s investigating the social background of man who engage in homosexual behavior in public facilities; controversially, he did not obtain informed consent from his subjects.

Question 14

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

Answer 14

A U.S. federal law passed in 1996 that guaranatees, among other things, specified privacy rights for medical patients, in particular those in research settings

Question 15

Confidentiality

Answer 15

Provided by research in which identifying infomraiton that could be used to link respondents to their response is available only to designed resarch personnel for specific research needs

Question 16

Certificate of Confidentiality

Answer 16

Document issued by the National Institutes of Health to protect researchers from being legally required to disclose confidential information