![]() Psychologists are continually concerned about the ethics of researches and experiments. Researches in psychology may cause some stress, harm, or inconvenience for the people who participate. The most direct ethical concern of the scientist is to prevent harm to the research participants. There is an infamous research by Stanley Milgram that portrays ethical problems. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. This experiment required participants to be paired with another person, and each one would either be the ‘learner’ or the ‘teacher’. This draw was always fixed so that the participant would always be the teacher, and the learner would always be one of Milgram’s assistants. The learner was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his or her arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts. Surprisingly, 65% of the participants continued to the highest level. This experiment started a controversial discussion since it contained several ethical issues. Participants experienced extremely stressful situations, and they were under circumstances of psychological harm. Also, in an experiment called the Stanford Prison, the participants began to suffer through humiliations and punishments, and many started to show signs of mental and emotional distress. Now, these studies are prohibited due to potential psychological harm to the participants. Moreover, psychologists are stressing the idea of free choice in ethical standards. Free choice refers to the idea that the participant is always free to participate in the research or leave the experiment if he or she wishes to. This was also violated in Milgram’s experiment because many pleaded to be allowed to stop the experiment, but they were not allowed to withdraw. The most widespread ethical concern to the participants in behavior research is the extent to which researchers employ deception. There are two types of deception: active and passive. An active deception is when the researcher tells the participants that he or she is studying learning when in fact the experiment really concerns obedience to authority. Passive is when participants are not told about the hypothesis being studied or the potential use of the data being collected. Deception can be seen in Milgram's experiment, since participants believed that they were actually shocking the person and were unaware that it was all planned out. Furthermore, privacy must always be protected. To protect privacy, psychologists usually come up with unique methods. One technique is to assign a code or a number to identify the person. This was a little introduction to the basic concerns of conducting ethical experiments, and new regulations will be added in the future.
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