The Five 5 Principles Of Ethics In Psychology

Ethics are a huge part of today’s psychology and they should be. Without ethics human research could prove to be very dangerous and damaging to the mind. Psychologists are required to follow 5 general principles of ethics and could lose their license in psychology if they stray from them. This code can lead to very interesting and safe studies conducted by professional psychologists. The 5 principles are beneficence and non-maleficence, fidelity and responsibility, integrity, justice, and respect for people’s rights and dignity (JEPS Bulletin).

The first set of ethics is beneficence and non-maleficence. The term non-maleficence refers to the avoidance of needless harm to your subject and beneficence refers to the actions you take to avoid

Integrity is like honesty, if you promise that you will do something you have to keep your promise and do it. Integrity does not only mean that you must keep your promises, it also means you can’t hide anything. The term “informed consent” is used when discussing this principle. Informed consent refers to a psychologist telling the subject exactly what is about to happen without hiding any details, even small ones that you think may not matter. You must always be very clear when you tell a client what is going to occur and what you sincerely believe the outcome will be. Quality service is expected out of psychologists and they are trained and payed to give it. By conducting subpar studies or giving weak analyses, the psychologist is not following the principle of integrity. A psychologist is also expected to turn down a job if it appears to be harmful or not beneficial to people or a person (Ethics: An Introduction). The fourth principle is justice. In this setting, justice does not mean that it is applied in a court of law but in the fact that psychologist should be aware of who they’re providing help or information to. For instance, if a known convict comes to you for help you reserve the right to turn him down and should, assuming he wasn’t posing a threat to you. A psychologist should also be sure that their work is complete and concise before publishing it and also that it is available to everyone who may want it (Ethics: An

However, the third principle has a couple of safe loopholes. As stated earlier, informed consent is when a psychologist tells a client or subject exactly what they are about to do. Though this is the ethical thing to do in most cases, the opposite must be done in others. In the case of testing a placebo versus a real drug, you would not tell the subject what they are taking. If the subjects were aware that what they were taking was just a sugar pill, they would not feel any different, but if they thought they were taking pain medication, they may begin to feel better because their brain tells them to. In this case, though you aren’t using informed consent. You still must debrief the subject so they know what happened (Rathus