ETHICS
SPECIFICATION: Ethical implications of research studies and theory, including reference to social sensitivity
Ethics include the role of the British Psychological Society’s code of ethics, ethical issues in the design and conduct of psychological studies, and ethical issues in research.
UNETHICAL RESEARCH
Socially sensitive research
Socially Sensitive Research (SSR)
Research that has implications that extend beyond the PPs used in the study, during the study
• For the participants
• For the group they represent
• People potentially affected include:
· The participants themselves (beyond the
· study)
· People close to them (e.g., family, friends, colleagues)
· The social group from which they were drawn (e.g. ethnic, cultural)
· The researchers & their institution
There has been an assumption that psychologists follow the BPS guidelines when using human participants. For example, no deception, humiliation, physical or emotional stress; a full debrief and opportunity to ask questions and withdraw their data. Finally, their confidentiality is assured. If all this is followed correctly and the participants leave the study in a similar state of mind to how they were before the study, job done – all ethical concerns with the research have been covered!.
Right?
Wrong?
We therefore have the bizarre situation where psychologists believe that it is unethical to embarrass or harm individual black or female participants but consider it ethically acceptable to carry out research that humiliates or harms the larger population of blacks or women in society as Brown (1997) put it:
‘As long as research ethics avoid the matter of whether certain questions ethically cannot be asked, psychology will conduct technically ethical research that violates a more general ethic of avoiding harm to vulnerable populations.
For centuries scientists have claimed that women are intellectually inferior to men and blacks are inferior to whites. Although these claims have been contested and corrected for centuries, they continue to be made. Meanwhile, scientists have documented the harm done to women and blacks by the publication of such claims. Can anything be done to improve this situation? Freedom of research is universally recognized to be of first-rate importance. Yet, constraints on that freedom are also universally recognized.
How would you feel if someone were researching romantic relationships by recording and analysing all the text messages you sent to that person?
Consider the following example
SCENARIO ONE
The gene responsible for MAOA has been linked to criminal behaviour by researchers such as Brunner et al who studied a family that showed a link between the disturbed MAOA gene and aggressive behaviour. All males who were affected and showed aggressive and perverse behaviour along with low IQ showed genetic mutations in the genes producing MAOA.
It has been found that Maoris have a higher percentage of this gene in their population
DOES THIS RESEARCH RAISE ANY ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS BEYOND THE STUDIES THAT WERE CONDUCTED?
The story of the warrior gene dates back to the early 1990s when several groups reported a link between violent aggression and a gene on the X chromosome that encodes for an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), which regulates the function of the neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin. The correlation first emerged from studies of a large Dutch family whose male members were mildly retarded and extremely violent. Two were arsonists, one tried to run over an employer with a car, another raped his sister and tried to stab the warden of a mental hospital with a pitchfork. The men all lacked monoamine oxidase A, suggesting that they possessed a defective version of the MAOA gene.
Later, other researchers reported a correlation between violent aggression and an allele of the MAOA gene, MAOA-L, that produces low levels of the MAOA enzyme; the correlation was reportedly stronger if carriers had experienced some sort of trauma as children. The MAOA allele occurs in apes and Old World monkeys as well as in humans, leading to speculation that the allele arose 25 million years ago in the common ancestor of these primates and was subsequently favoured by natural selection. In a May 4, 2004, article reviewing all this research, Science dubbed the MAOA allele "the warrior gene," the oldest reference I have found to the term.
Race, inevitably, reared its head. In 2007 Rod Lea and Geoffrey Chambers, researchers at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, reported that MAOA-L occurs in 56 percent of Maori men. "It is well recognized," the researchers commented in The New Zealand Medical Journal, "that historically Maori were fearless warriors." The researchers' racial profiling was based on a study of 46 men, who needed to have only one Maori parent to be defined as Maori. Lea and Chambers reported that MAOA-L was less common among Caucasians (34 per cent) and Hispanics (29 per cent) but even more common among Africans (59 per cent) and Chinese (77 per cent).
In 2009 Kevin Beaver, a criminologist at Florida State University, claimed that males with MAOA-L are more likely to report being gang members (pdf). But his study also showed that most MAOA-L carriers are not gang members; moreover, about 40 per cent of the gang members were not MAOA-L carriers. Like McDermott, Beaver was featured on the National Geographic show "Born to Rage?"
THINK about how the study affects the population of people that the research applies to,
e.g., Maoris or men who have the MAOA L (PSYCHOPATH GENE).
I. How do they feel about the research being published and their friends, family, and colleagues knowing?
II. Will it affect their life chances, e.g., discrimination, or lack of opportunity?
III. Will the media relay the information correctly, and accurately?
CONCLUSIONS: Research in this area has raised the question of genetic testing, discrimination and lack of free will.
SCENARIO TWO
Caughy et al 1994 found that middle-class children put in daycare at an early age generally score less on cognitive tests than children from similar findings reared in the home.
I. How do they feel about the research being published and their friends, family, and colleagues knowing?
II. Will it affect their life chances, e.g., discrimination, or lack of opportunity?
III. Will the media relay the information correctly, and accurately?
CONCLUSIONS:
Assuming all guidelines were followed, neither the parents nor the children who participated would have been unduly affected by this research. Nobody would have been deceived, consent would have been obtained, and no harm would have been caused. However, think of the wider implications of this study when the results are published, particularly for parents of middle-class infants who are considering placing their young charges in daycare or those who recently have!
SCENARIO TWO
Repeatedly, IQ tests administered to black Americans show that they typically score 15 points below the average white score.
I. How do they feel about the research being published and their friends, family, and colleagues knowing?
II. Will it affect their life chances, e.g., discrimination, or lack of opportunity?
III. Will the media relay the information correctly, and accurately?
CONCLUSIONS:
When black Americans are given these tests, they presumably complete them willingly and are in no way harmed as individuals. However, when published, findings of this sort seek to reinforce racial stereotypes and are used to discriminate against the black population in the job market etc. (In extreme cases they have also led to the compulsory sterilisation of American blacks to protect the ‘*gene pool’).
OTHER SSR EXAMPLES INCLUDE:
• HAMER (1993) – ‘The Gay Gene’
• RAINE (1996) – ‘Killer Babies’
• LOWNEY (1995) – ‘Teenage Satanists • Humphreys (1970) – ‘The Tea Room’
Researchers need to be cautious because:
SSR has the potential to affect the lives of many people
By its nature, it attracts the attention of psychologists, media & the public – so often high-profile
SIEBER & STANLEY (1988)
What makes a study socially sensitive?
Sieber and Stanley (1988) used the term social sensitivity to describe studies where there are potential social consequences for the participants or the group of people represented by the research.
4 groups that may be affected by psychological research:
Members of the social group being studied such as racial or ethnic group. For example, early research on IQ was used to discriminate against US Blacks.
Friends and relatives of those taking part in the study, particularly in case studies, where individuals may become famous or infamous. Cases that spring to mind would include Genie’s mother,
The research teams. There are examples of researchers being intimidated because of the line of research they are in.
The institution in which the research is conducted.
RESEARCH CAN BECOME SSR FOR MANY REASONS INCLUDING:
SIEBER & STANLEY
The research question
Treatment of participants
The institutional context
Interpretation and use of findings
LEE (1993)
SSR is that which contains an element of threat or risk
Topics that are private, stressful or sacred
Potential for exposure of incriminating or stigmatising info
SSR can have major consequences for researchers e.g.:
Negative media exposure
Conflict with colleagues
Loss of position/job
Threats from extremist groups
REPERCUSSIONS SSR
Can we blame researchers if they avoid SSR?
SCARR (1988)
• We have a responsibility to do SSR even if we don’t like the findings
• SSR can be very important in raising awareness e.g., of inequality & its effects
ARONSON (1992)
Stopping SSR or conducting it in secret would be a backward step
Better to educate the public about SSR so they can understand it better and recognise abuses “Shying away from controversial topics...[is] an avoidance of responsibility.”
In short SSR IS
The American Psychological Association’s (APA) definition of socially sensitive research:
[Socially sensitive] research on topics likely to evoke controversy in the community or strong emotional responses from participants. Such topics would include those that have ethical implications affecting subgroups or cultures within society (e.g., ethnic minorities) [...]
Sieber and Stanley suggest four ways in which research can be socially sensitive. Researchers should make these considerations before conducting a study or developing a theory.
Research that is: sensitive, embarrassing, private, socially stigmatised, illegal, immoral or dangerous to the participant. Examples: domestic violence, incest, sexual abuse, romantic relationships, underage: sex, smoking drug taking, sexual preference, sexual deviancies, gang behaviour, eating disorders including obesity, Anorexia and Bulimia, other criminal activities like prostitution, football hooliganism.
The need for SSR research to be confidential so it has no legal/emotional/ violent repercussions. If identities are revealed, the person may be beaten, lose their job, ostracised by society and/or their family etc. The researcher also needs to be protected from potential harm.
The research must not stereotype all the people who are in its group. If you are researching women who have experienced female circumcision, be careful that the public is not left with the impression that is practised by all Muslims, East Africans or only Muslims for example
SSR RESEARCH DESIGNS
Before beginning research, the researcher should carefully consider their research question(s) to ensure that they are not biased or harmful in any way. A question such as, ‘Which gender is better at memory processing?’ could be detrimental because it assumes that one gender is better at memory processing than another.
Methodology used
The methodology used must take into account the rights of participants to confidentiality and anonymity. Will these rights be compromised if the participant confesses to a crime, for example? Researchers should also keep a cost-benefit analysis in mind. If the costs of a research (e.g., participant exposure) outweigh the benefits (e.g., a topic that benefits society), the research would be unethical.
Institutional context
Researchers need to be clear about who is funding the research and its purpose. Is it a government or a private organisation? If it is a private organisation, how will they use the results?
Interpretation and application of findings
Researchers should consider how their results will be interpreted and applied in the real world. Will they lead to policy changes? Could they influence social attitudes or values or lead to further research on the same topic? Conducting socially sensitive research may have ethical implications for participants or the general findings of research are interpreted and applied.
Ethical Guidelines For Carrying Out SSR
AO1
Sieber and Stanley suggest the following ethical guidelines for carrying out SSR. There is some overlap between these and research on human participants in general.
Privacy: This refers to people, rather than data. Asking people questions of a personal nature (e.g. about sexuality) could offend.
Confidentiality: This refers to data. Information (e.g. about H.I.V. status), leaked to others, may affect the participant’s life.
Sound & valid methodology: This is even more vital when the research topic is socially sensitive. Academics can detect flaws in methods but the lay public and the media often don’t. When research findings are publicised, people are likely to take them as fact and policies may be based on them. Examples are Bowlby’s maternal deprivation studies and
Sieber & Stanley (1988) also suggest there are 4 main ethical concerns when conducting SSR:
intelligence testing.
Deception: Causing the wider public to believe something, which isn’t true by the findings, you report (e.g. that parents are responsible for how their children turn out).
Informed consent: Participants should be made aware of how taking part in the research may affect them.
Justice & equitable treatment: Examples of unjust treatment are (i) publicising an idea, which creates a prejudice against a group, & (ii) withholding a treatment, which you believe is beneficial, from some participants so that you can use them as controls. E.g. The Tuskergee Study which withheld treatment for STIs from black men to investigate the effects of syphilis on the body.
Scientific freedom: Science should not be censored but there should be some monitoring of sensitive research. The researcher should weigh their responsibilities against their rights to do the research.
Ownership of data: When research findings could be used to make social policies, which affect people’s lives, should they be publicly accessible? Sometimes, a party commissions research with their interests in mind (e.g. an industry, an advertising agency, a political party, or the military). Some people argue that scientists should be compelled to disclose their results so that other scientists can re-analyse them. If this had happened in Burt’s day, there may not have been such widespread belief in the genetic transmission of intelligence. George Miller (Miller’s Magic 7) famously argued that we should give psychology away.
The values of social scientists: Psychologists can be divided into 2 main groups: those who advocate a humanistic approach (individuals are important and worthy of study, quality of life is important, intuition is useful) and those advocating a scientific approach (rigorous methodology, objective data). The researcher’s values may conflict with those of the participant/institution. For example, if someone with a scientific approach was evaluating a counselling technique based on a humanistic approach, they would judge it on criteria that those giving & receiving the therapy may not consider important.
Cost/benefit analysis: If the costs outweigh the potential/actual benefits, it is unethical. However, it is difficult to assess costs & benefits accurately & the participants themselves rarely benefit from research.
Sieber & Stanley advise that researchers should not avoid researching socially sensitive issues.
Scientists have a responsibility to society to find useful knowledge.
• They need to take more care over consent, debriefing, etc. when the issue is sensitive.
• They should be aware of how their findings may be interpreted & used by others.
• They should make explicit the assumptions underlying their research so that the public can consider whether they agree with these.
• They should make the limitations of their research explicit (e.g. ‘the study was only carried out on white middle-class American male students’, ‘the study is based on questionnaire data, which may be inaccurate’, etc.
• They should be careful how they communicate with the media and policymakers.
• They should be aware of the balance between their obligations to participants and those to society (e.g. if the participant tells them something which they feel they should tell the police/social services).
• They should be aware of their values and biases and those of the participants.
Arguments for SSR (AO3)
• Psychologists have devised methods to resolve the issues raised.
• SSR is the most scrutinised research in psychology. Ethical committees reject more SSR than any other form of research.
• By gaining a better understanding of issues such as gender, race and sexuality we can gain a greater acceptance and reduce prejudice.
• SSR has been of benefit to society, for example, EWT. This has made us aware that EWT can be flawed and should not be used without corroboration. It has also made us aware that the EWT of children is every bit as reliable as that of adults.
• Most research is still carried out on white middle-class Americans (about 90% of research quoted in texts!). SSR is helping to redress the balance and make us more aware of other cultures and outlooks.
Arguments against SSR (AO3)
• Flawed research has been used to dictate social policy and put certain groups at a disadvantage.
• Research has been used to discriminate against groups in society such as sterilisation of people in the USA between 1910 and 1920 because they were of low intelligence, criminal or suffered from psychological illness.
• The guidelines used by psychologists to control SSR lack power and as a result are unable to prevent indefensible research from being carried out.
APPLIED EXAMPLES
Both Social and Biological Psychology entail issues surrounding the social sensitivity of their research, referring to at what cost the ethical implications as a by-product of studies come, in terms of the benefit they achieve as a result.
In Biological Psychology an example of this is in Raine’s 1997 study, looking into whether the neural activity of murderers (pleading not guilty for reason of insanity - NGRI) differed from that of non-murderer control participants. By utilising PET scans, Raine found that murderers had lower activity in their frontal cortex, corpus callosum, and left amygdala and hippocampus, whilst they had higher activity in their right amygdala and hippocampus.
This pointed to the conclusion that indeed the activity in murderers’ brains differed from that of the general population. However, this raised a socially sensitive issue relating to what would be done with such information.
If it were to be interpreted as a cause-and-effect relationship (in that the imbalance of neural activity caused the criminal behaviour), the data in effect could be used to look at whether people were predisposed to such activities. This may be done in the form of conducting similar scans of children (before any criminality), which would not only be invasive to them and perhaps their parents but would have wider implications regarding how the situation would be handled if they did indeed find the same brain activity in the children as they did in the NGRI participants of Raine’s study. This child may be ‘branded’ a criminal which would not only arouse upset but perhaps enact itself as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Raine’s results were merely correlational thus no cause-and-effect relationship can be drawn, in effect giving a child this label could be the cause of what it is trying to prevent – affecting the child’s self-image and how others are aware of the label see them, and eventually being so instilled into their perception that they commit criminal acts. Thus, although Raine’s findings could theoretically prevent criminality for example by instilling early intervention in the form of counselling, there is no causal evidence that establishes the link between brain activity and murder, so perhaps the utility of his findings would, in a cost-benefit analysis, promote worse than good.
In Social Psychology, we could look to research such as that carried out by Stanley Milgram in his range of experiments investigating obedience in the 1960s to highlight the dangers of conducting socially sensitive research. Milgram’s studies involved the participant acting as a ‘teacher’ to a confederate ‘learner’ who they perceived to be another participant, asking them questions about word pairs and if they got them wrong, having to administer ‘electric shocks’ to the learner, increasing in voltage every time they got one wrong. The electric shocks were not real; however, the participants were made to think that they were a result of deception by experimenters administering a ‘sample’ 45V shock to the PPs. It is this very idea of deception that raises the initial issues about Milgram’s study. Participants were in effect tricked into thinking that they were harming another individual, and although they had a right to withdraw from this, this was only after several verbal ‘prods’ reminding them that they ‘must continue’. Thus, even though the participants were debriefed afterwards, this could result in some degree of psychological damage to participants, at least in terms of having to live with the fact that they could perform such violent acts, perhaps leading to some form of self-deprecation – especially to the 65% who reached the full ‘450V’. Not only this, but the stressful nature of the experiment additionally led to 3 participants having full-blown seizures, events which have the potential to significantly damage their wellbeing and also as a by-product affect their families and loved ones who would be concerned about their health. Although the benefits of Milgram’s studies help explain such atrocities as the Nazi death camps and have led to the development of theories such as Agency Theory which could prevent such events from occurring in the future, this is at the expense of the potential health and well-being of all participants involved in the study. Whilst more people could potentially be helped as a result of this research, this is only a possibility and is not guaranteed, thus perhaps the benefits are not worth the socially sensitive costs – especially when they are in the form of something as serious as a seizure. If the theory were to be utilised in this way, then such costs would be ‘minor’ in comparison to the lives saved, however again, this is not a guarantee, thus Milgram’s research into social psychology poses an ethical risk greater than the potential benefits it could yield.
Overall, both Social and Biological Psychology and the research within them carry significant risks which could put the well-being of their participants and those around them at risk. Whilst Raine’s biological findings could potentially provide a basis to spot future criminals and indeed help the participants with their claim of NGRI, the former could be an ethical disadvantage, especially considering the study did not establish a causal relationship.
In addition, Milgram’s study provided grounds to develop theories such as Agency Theory which helps understand and potentially resolve obedience-related atrocities, it does so whilst risking the self-concept and physical health of the participants, thus until the former has been seen in practice, this is too great of an ethical weakness. Thus, to conclude, perhaps the most meaningful findings come with an element of risk, which experimenters in both social and biological psychology must carefully consider before any future research
QUESTIONS
1. Discuss socially sensitive research about a social explanation of criminal behaviour.
2. Socially sensitive research causes psychological harm.
3. Some socially sensitive research should never be published. Give examples.
4. What about the MAOA L gene, explain?
5. Give examples of how Socially sensitive research is...
· - Controversial
· - Risking stereotyping and prejudice
· - Subject to social values
· - Able to shape the law
· Misrepresented in the media
6. The idea of “forbidden research” challenges us to question long-standing laws and rules about what knowledge we can seek, and whether that knowledge improves or impedes the health and sustainability of society. Deeply held moral beliefs have led to laws that restrict research on organismal engineering. Artificial intelligence and machine rights raise uncomfortable social, cultural, and legal questions. Misconceptions about Islam and women’s rights are amplified around the world, especially now in a time of politically charged racism in America. Climate and environmental engineering offer massive potential and massive risk. Can we afford to take those risks? Can we afford not to?
TEST YOURSELF
