Chapter 4

Question 1

What are the three ethical principles of the Belmont Report and how are they applied?

Answer 1

1. Respect for persons - process of informed consent and protection of special groups in research like children or prisoners
2. Beneficence - the evaluation of risks and benefits to participants in the study and to society as a whole
3. Justice - the way participants are selected for research > one group should not bear the burden for research and participants should be representative of the group that benefits from the research.

Question 2

What are the similarities/differences between the Belmont Report’s principles and the five APA Ethical Principles?

Answer 2

The APA Ethical principles are not just for research, but also for teachers and professionals in psychology. They include 2 more principles: fidelity and responsibility (establishing trust, accepting responsibility for professional behaviour) and the principle of integrity (striving to be accurate, truthful and honest in one’s work).

Question 3

What are the procedure that are in place to protect human and animal subjects in research?

Answer 3

The APA’s ethical standard 8 provides enforcable guidelines such as informed consent, institutional review boards, deception, debriefing, research misconduct and animal research.

Question 4

What are some of the ways that ethical decision making requires balancing priorities?

Answer 4

1. Risk vs. Benefits - does the research benefit society, and is it worth the harm it may cause?
2. Rights of individual participants vs. societal gains - is deceiving them in a situation okay and when does it become too much?
3. Free participation vs. coercion - although participants may want to be compensated, when is the monetary reward too small or too great?

Question 5

What are some historical examples of unethical research?

Answer 5

1. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study - harming people, not asking for consent and targeting a particular group in research
2. The Milgram obedience studies - grey areas in ethical research, such as how researchers define harm to patients and balancing risk-reward.

Question 6

What is data fabrication and flasification?

Answer 6

Fabrication - researchers inventing data to fit their hypotheses
Falsification - researchers influencing a study’s results

Question 7

What are the three principles of ethical animal research?

Answer 7

1. Replacement - alternatives to animals should be found first
2. Refinement - researchers must modify experimental procedure to minimise animal distress
3. Reduction - researchers should adopt experimental designs and procedures with as few animal subjects as possible