Ethical Decision-Making

Decision-making is an essential and crucial part of psychologists’ work. Because these decisions immediately or in a long perspective affect others, psychologists bear direct responsibilities to the society and those with whom they work.

One of the components that ensure right decision-making is a professional competence, which is not limited to the professional and scientific knowledge and appropriate skills, but also encompasses familiarity with laws, regulations, and policies. The standards on competence are addressed in the Section 2 of the APA Ethics Code, which includes important positions on boundaries of competence, bases for scientific and professional judgments, maintenance of competence and even discusses the importance of dealing

In reality this process if far more complicated. As Kimmel (1991) points out, despite the existing set of ethical standards there are individual differences in ethical decision-making among psychologists that result from cultural and personal characteristics, interests, and values. Differences in sex, age, training, experience, as well as differences in the area and type of employment influence ethical evaluations made by individual psychologists. While these biosocial and professional factors can be recognized and the role that they play in dealing with ethical dilemmas can be acknowledged, there is not only

The question here is should researchers be trusted to make ethical decisions by themselves, relying on their professional competence, experience, and knowledge of ethical principles and standards; or should researchers be overseen by the formal committee to ensure that their work is ethical? Examples of some institutional ethics regulation cases and comparison of research ethics protocols in the academy with journalistic practices described by Haggerty (2004) certainly demonstrate the profound bureaucratization and expansion of the regulatory system. It also shows how inconsistent and sometimes inadequate the system is in interpreting and applying central concepts of research ethics such as “harm”, “risk”, “anonymity”, “informed consent”, “research”, and