What an ethical issue is

1. An ethical issue is a conflict, not a mistake.
2. On one side sits what a researcher must do to get a genuine, useful result, and on the other sits the right of the people taking part to be treated properly.
3. The issue arises because those two things pull in opposite directions, so satisfying one often costs you the other.

The prison study, where the design itself produced the harm

1. Haney, Banks and Zimbardo (1973) advertised in a newspaper, drew 75 replies, selected 24 normal, healthy men after assessment and interview, and ran the study with 22 of them at $15 a day.
2. The prisoners were arrested at home by Palo Alto police, booked, blindfolded, deloused and issued with a smock carrying an ID number, an ankle chain and no underwear.
3. Five prisoners were released early, with symptoms beginning as early as day two for four of them and a psychosomatic rash in the fifth.
4. The study was stopped on day six of a planned fourteen.
5. Protection from harm is the sharpest issue here, and the reason is structural: the distress did not follow one careless instruction but grew out of the roles the situation handed people.
6. The right to withdraw is the second issue, and the parole meeting on day four is the evidence, because three of the five prisoners who appeared offered to forfeit their pay to be let out rather than simply leaving.

The subway study, where nobody agreed to take part

1. Piliavin et al. (1969) ran a field experiment on the seven and a half minute non-stop run between 59th and 125th Street on the New York subway.
2. Across 103 trials some 4450 men and women were present, with a mean of 43 bystanders in a carriage.
3. Seventy seconds into each journey a confederate collapsed, appearing either ill with a cane or drunk with a bottle, and stayed on the floor until somebody helped.
4. Informed consent is the first issue, because the people whose behaviour was recorded were passengers who had agreed to nothing at all.
5. Deception is the second, because the collapse was staged and every person in the carriage believed they were watching a real emergency.
6. Protection from harm is the third, because watching a stranger collapse is distressing, and in 21 of the 103 trials 34 people moved out of the critical area.
7. The conflict is unusually clean in this study, because a real emergency with real bystanders is precisely what gives the findings their ecological validity, and it cannot be staged with volunteers who know what is coming.

Consent when participants are not free to refuse

1. Peterson and Peterson (1959) recruited 24 students at Indiana University for whom taking part was a course requirement.
   1. If your course requires you to take part, it is hard to argue that your agreement was freely given, and just as hard to walk out halfway through.
2. Piaget and Inhelder (1956) tested 100 children aged between four and twelve on the three mountains task.
   1. A young child cannot give informed consent in the way an adult can, so it has to be sought from a parent and the child's own willingness watched throughout.
3. Damasio et al. (1994) reconstructed Phineas Gage's injury from his preserved skull and compared it with 12 patients whose damage lay in the same ventromedial region.
   1. Gage died long before, so his consent could never be sought, and yet he is named everywhere, which is the opposite of the confidentiality a living participant would expect.

Withholding the real aim of a study

1. Bartlett (1932) told his 20 participants only that their recall accuracy was being tested as they reproduced an unfamiliar folk tale over months and years.
   1. Withholding the real aim like that is a mild form of deception.
   2. The reason is easy to see: a participant who knows their memory is expected to distort will start trying to correct the distortion, and the effect disappears.
2. Gunderson et al. (2013) recorded 90 minutes of family life in the home every four months from 14 months of age, drawing 53 children from families already enrolled in a language-development study.
   1. Years of recordings inside people's homes raise confidentiality, since the tapes capture far more of a family's private life than the few utterances being coded.

Confidentiality when the data is deeply personal

1. Caspi et al. (2003) genotyped 847 members of the Dunedin cohort, recorded 14 stressful life events between their 21st and 26th birthdays and assessed depression by diagnostic interview.
   1. A person's genetic results sitting beside a psychiatric diagnosis is about as sensitive as personal data gets, so confidentiality has to be absolute.
   2. Protection from harm matters too, since 17% had had a depressive episode in the past year and 3% a suicide attempt, and being asked to recall those experiences can reopen them.
2. Young (2007) studied 114 clients at a treatment centre who reported problems with time, relationships, work and money.
   1. These were people who had come asking for help, so they were in a dependent position and may have found it hard to say no to a researcher who was also their source of treatment.
3. Sperry (1968) tested 11 patients whose corpus callosum had been severed to treat severe epilepsy.
   1. The surgery had been carried out to treat their epilepsy rather than for this research, so the study itself caused none of the damage.
   2. The issue is instead that 11 patients from one rare surgical group are small enough in number to be identifiable, so confidentiality is genuinely difficult to protect.

Reaching a judgement about an ethical issue

1. Because an ethical issue is a conflict, a judgement has to weigh both sides rather than simply condemn the researcher.
2. The most useful question to ask is whether the same knowledge could have been reached another way, because if it could, the issue becomes very hard to justify.
3. Compare the size of the conflicts as part of your judgement, since withholding the aim of a story-recall task is not remotely the same as a man collapsing in front of strangers on a train.

Turning this into marks

1. Naming a study earns nothing, so quote the feature of its procedure that produced the issue, such as the parole meeting or the staged collapse.
2. Say which issue that feature raises, using the exact term, such as informed consent or protection from harm.
3. The mark most often lost is the supported judgement, so weigh what was learned against what it cost the participants.