Discussion Activity- Ethical Behavior in Research Consider the APA Code of Conduct and the guideline for informed consent to evaluate the ethics involved in the following situations. Post a statement of your view. You must also include specific examples of how these issues do or don’t violate today’s ethical standards for conducting research (see lab manual pages 17-18 and figure 2.12 in your chapter 2 powerpoint “ethics in research”). (For each situation you will be awarded 2 points for posting to discussion board and 2 points for responding to a post made by other students on the discussion board =
total 12 points) 1. In Nazi Germany, many atrocities against humanity were committed. Many inhumane experiments were conducted – the results of which may be useful today. Should these data be utilized to advance our scientific knowledge or should this information be discarded because of the way in which it was gathered? (1 post, 1 response to posting = 4 points) 2. Read the description of Milgram’s experiment on the previous page. In this experiment subjects were led to believe they were shocking another person at intensities of up to 450 volts. During the procedure they were repeatedly told by the experimenter that they “must continue” and that the “experiment requires that you continue.” The majority of subjects demonstrated full obedience all the way up to the maximum shock intensity. Was this use of deception and coercion ethical? (1 post, 1
response to posting = 4 points) 3. In the 1920’s, Watson and Rayner used a 9-month-old baby to investigate conditioning techniques. These researchers paired a stimulus that produced a fear reaction (loud noise) with a stimulus that did not produced a fear reaction (white rat) to verify whether humans could be conditioned to fear non-threatening objects. After conditioning Little Albert to fear various objects, the experiment ended abruptly, eliminating the possibility to uncondition the responses. Develop an argument about whether or not the experiment was ethical. (1 post, 1 response to posting = 4 points)