Ethics Flashcards
Ethics
refers to the correct rules of conduct necessary when carrying out research. Psychologists have a moral responsibility to protect research participants from physical and psychological harm.
Another reason for ethics is that when participants feel that they have been taken advantage of, deceived, or harmed, this hurts the field of psychology, making it less likely for people to volunteer to participate.
Cognitive process and ethics
The cognitive approach studies cognitive processes such as memory.
Manipulating people’s memories or challenging their memories may have a negative effect on their self-esteem or self-confidence.
And yet, we have learned a lot about how memories are formed and how they affect our behaviour by carrying out experiments.
Deception is often used in experiments of false memories.
When researching with individuals who have cognitive impairments, it is sometimes difficult to get their true consent to take part in the study.
Deception
In many cases in the cognitive approach, but also in other parts of psychology, the true aim of the study cannot be revealed to participants as it may change their behaviour. This is why some degree of deception often has to be used. However, deception must be as minimal as possible and fully justified by the purposes of the study.
Type of deception
Several studies investigating memory distortion and false memories make use of deception.
There are two types of deception used in psychological research deception by omission and deception by commission.
Loftus and Palmer
Loftus and Palmer carried out a study on the misinformation effect by using deception by omission that is, leaving out information about the study when getting consent.
Participants were asked to watch films of car accidents.
They were then given a questionnaire which asked them information about the film that they saw.
The key question was “how fast was the car going when it hit the other car?”
However, there were five different conditions.
The verb in the question was changed with different intensities such as ‘smashed’ to see if the memory of the speed was affected by the way the leading question was phrased.
This study helped the researchers to find out that leading questions could affect the recalling of memory.
What did Loftus and Palmer have to insure?
Due to deception being used, Loftus and Palmer had to insure that the participants were aware of the aim of the experiment and what the experiment was about at the end of the experiment.
This is done in a debrief.
Therefore, the debrief and informed consent interlink between each other.
After the study participants must be fully informed about its nature, its true aims, how the data will be used and stored.
They must be given an opportunity to review their results and withdraw the data if they want to.
If deception was used, it must be revealed. Care must be taken to protect participants from any possible harm including long term effects such as recurring uncomfortable thoughts. In some cases psychological help must be offered to monitor the psychological state of the participant for some time after the study.
Undue stress or harm
In the cognitive approach there is also a risk for experiments to cause undue harm or stress on the participants.
This means that at all times during the study participants must be protected from physical and mental harm.
This includes possible negative long term consequences of participating in a research study.
When researching about the reliability of memory, certain studies analyse the recalling from participants of traumatic life experiences.
This can be stressful for the participant as it is remembering painful memories.
There is a high emphasis on ‘undue’ which means that the stress is at a higher level than an individual may experience on a day-to-day basis.
Yuille and Cutshall
A study that might have encountered this ethical issue is Yuille and Cutshall.
They investigated misleading questions on information of a robbery and to see whether reconstructive memory still applies and functions in a naturalistic environment or whether there is another mechanism that functions.
The procedure of the study was that after a real life robbery, where the owner untied and killed the robber.
The witnesses were interviewed by police and four months later, they were interviewed again but with some having leading questions and misleading information and others not.
The results were that misleading questions had very little effect on recall.
Participants were able to accurately recall a large number of details.
The two potential explanations for these results are that either reconstructive memory is a phenomenon that is only found in artificial conditions of laboratory experiment or that the study actually tapped into a different memory phenomenon called flashbulb memory.
This study was therefore important as it puts the whole reconstructive memory theory into question as it casts doubts about in which situations does reconstructive memory actually function.
Ethics and Yuille and Cutshall
However, it has the same ethical issue with Loftus and Palmer which is that it uses deception by omission by not telling the participants all the information about the experiment to be able to reduce demand characteristics.
The study also faces the issue of undue stress or harm as participants had to recall the stressful event of the robbery.
This would therefore cause ‘undue’ stress as it would lead to more stress than what the participants might have experienced on a daily basis.
To make the study comply with ethical guidelines and to make sure that the participants would not be unhappy with the experiment or were unexpected with the procedure, the researchers gave the participants a consent form informing them that they would discuss on the robbery.
A consent form is part of another ethical consideration which is informed consent, as shown in this study informed consent can interlink with many other ethical considerations to make the study more ethical.
In this study, it therefore makes the study ethical as participants were willing to recall about the event and therefore they were allowed to not participate if they were not willing to discuss about the event.
Conclusion on ethics
Ethical considerations are an important part of psychology.
Following ethics not only protects participants, but it helps to develop trust between participants and the field of psychology.
Without participants, we cannot do research.
When ethical considerations are not followed, there needs to be a justification that should be reviewed by an ethics panel.
Deception, for example, must be justified and its potential effect on participants should be discussed.
Debriefing, anonymity, and the right to withdraw are important ways to protect participants when they feel that this deception was not justified or that the study is stressful for them.
