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Importance of ethics in psychology
Importance of ethics in psychology
Strength and limitation of classical conditioning theory
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Several research projects over the years have been deemed unethical based on how researchers conducted the study. One of the main reasons why they are identified unethical is due to a lack of Code of Conduct in place. Due to the lack of rules in place researchers did not have to abide by any standards or maintain confidentiality. One of the most famous unethical cases of classical conditioning is called the Little Albert study. In 1919 at John Hopkins University, John Watson and his graduate student Rosaline Raynor wanted to investigate how children become fearful and wanted to perform tests to understand that psychological condition. According to Powell, Digdon, Harris, and Smithson (2014), for the purpose of this study they used a fictitious …show more content…
The purpose of their study was to condition a child to fear a distinctive stimulus that typically would not be naturally feared by an emotionally stable child. During the experiment, according to Field and Nightingale (2009), they exposed a nine-month-old infant to a series of white items such as a white rat, rabbit, a mask with and without hair, burning newspaper, and other miscellaneous items without any conditioning. At this time Albert, while sitting on a mattress in the middle of a room, showed no fear as he reached out to play with some of the items or animals. Watson then decided to administer a loud clanking noise behind Albert in order to distress him. The next step was to pair the loud noise with the exposure to the white furry animal(s) or object. When the conditioning started prior to the presentation of sound Albert would try to reach out to the white objects. After a few presentations Albert quickly grasped the idea that he was to fear any white furry object when they were presented to him without the sound being administered. Albert’s fear of the objects would cause him to become upset and cry immediately. This notion showed that a neutral stimulus could elicit a conditioned response when under distress causing lasting …show more content…
The first thing, that this experiment failed to do, was contain formal consent from this child’s parents. They did not inform Albert’s mother of any of the activities that took place during the study and conditioning. Informed consent was not provided to Albert’s mother, all of the information should have been provided prior to the start of the study so that any participation is based on knowledge. His mother was never given the opportunity to remove Albert from the study, which is
The first ethical principle is informed consent. This investigation valued informed consent by debriefing the process the participants were going to go through before the testing began, secured with a consent form that included the details of the investigation was signed by the participants. The participants had the option to participate which meant no consequence would apply if they did not participate; this is the second principle of voluntary participation. The participants were also given the freedom to withdraw from the testing at any time, for any reason. This is the third principle of the right to withdraw. This principle enables the participant to be aware that if they are not comfortable at any point of the testing, then they can withdraw from the
Parker focuses the majority of his writing on answering the question of whether or not the experiment uncovers any new information regarding obedience (100). Obstinately providing her opinion on this matter, Baumrind states in the beginning of her article that she believes that obedience and suggestibility cannot be realistically studied in a laboratory due to the anxiety in the environment (90). Supporting Baumrind’s opinionated claim, however, Parker effectively prompts readers to reconsider their views by describing a specific supporting scenario in which one of the subjects expresses that throughout the experiment he or she could not believe that Yale would conduct such a dangerous experiment (101). Parker logically interprets that subjects with similar suspicions as this one likely continued to obey the orders despite their disbelief due to the laboratory setting, suggesting that in the real world the consequences of violent actions are more obvious than in a test and that the experiment cannot be fully applied when studying obedience under authentic circumstances (101). Agreeing with Parker, Gina Perry, a psychologist and published author, describes the importance of the subjects’ belief in the validity of the shock machine in her article, “The Shocking Truth of the Notorious Milgram Obedience Experiments.” Perry
Kurayama, Matsuzawa, Komiya, Nakazawa, Yoshida, Shimizu, (2012) confirmed that these neutral stimuluses deed indeed has an effect and played a role in fear conditioning in people. The case showed that Treena had indeed learned to be scared of the incident and it proceeded to become a cue for to get anxious and get panic attacks. It has been claimed that patients with panic disorder exhibited fear potentiated startle responses to safety cues and therefore reduced discrimination between safety and danger signals during acquisition, indicating that the safety signal was processed as the aversive event in contrast to the danger signal (Nees, Heinrich, Flor, 2015). It also showed that the her failing to answer the question had affected her in other classes when she would not participate in other classes hence, this showed that the neutral stimulus has developed and grew into a conditioned stimulus which evoked feelings of fear and anxiety in her, in other words it had become a cue for her to be scared and
According to APA’s guidelines, John Watson’s “Little Albert” study would not be allowed today because of ethical violations. One ethical violation is the lack of consent from the subject. Little Albert could never give consent because he was an infant. Watson took advantage of the fact that Albert could not tell people that he wanted to withdraw from the study. Participants should always know what the study will involve and what risks might develop.
In observational learning, a child takes note of what his or her mother or father considers to be threatening. On the other hand, children can also be conditioned by their own life experiences through a process called operant conditioning (SOURCE). In some instances, children tend to generalize their fears, subsequently forming a phobia. For example, a young girl who became increasingly cautious of flying insects after an unpleasant encounter with a nest of agitated yellow jackets. After being assaulted by these creatures, she associated all flying bugs with the painful sting of a yellow jacket. Of course, children can also be classically conditioned to display a fearful response; that is, they learn to associate an unconditioned fear-relevant stimulus with a conditioned stimulus, provoking a conditioned, fearful response. One of the most well-known examples of this is an experiment involving a young boy, famously dubbed Little Albert. Little Albert learned to fear small furry animals in a laboratory setting when the presence of these creatures was paired with loud banging noises (SOURCE). From the aforementioned experiments and studies, it is undeniable that external circumstances and experiences assist in the configuration of fear in
In the following essay I will be looking into the study conducted by Watson and Rayner (1920) on a small child known as ‘Little Albert’. The experiment was an adaptation of earlier studies on classical conditioning of stimulus response, one most common by Ivan Pavlov, depicting the conditioning of stimulus response in dogs. Watson and Rayner aimed to teach Albert to become fearful of a placid white rat, via the use of stimulus associations, testing Pavlov’s earlier theory of classical conditioning.
The Asch and Milgram’s experiment were not unethical in their methods of not informing the participant of the details surrounding the experiment and the unwarranted stress; their experiment portrayed the circumstances of real life situation surrounding the issues of obedience to authority and social influence. In life, we are not given the courtesy of knowledge when we are being manipulated or influenced to act or think a certain way, let us be honest here because if we did know people were watching and judging us most of us would do exactly as society sees moral, while that may sound good in ensuring that we always do the right thing that would not be true to the ways of our reality. Therefore, by not telling the participants the detail of the experiment and inflicting unwarranted stress Asch and Milgram’s were
It is harder to go against or make an objection about unethical aspect of the experiment when people do not know each other well. Therefore, rather than strongly opposing and criticizing the instructor 's unethical decision, people just behaved according to the orders. Thirdly, the participants regarded the instructor as a professional researcher (Blass, 2009, p113). Therefore, they believed in the instructor 's decision to do so and obeyed the given instruction. Since Milgram or the instructor was a more intelligent person than most of the people, the participants would have imagined that there would be a specific reason why he held this experiment. Therefore the participants tried to understand the instructor 's intention and respected his choice. Or on the other hand, the participants were ignorant about the experiment, since they were not the one getting the consequent electric shocks. Lastly, the electric shocks were explained to the participants to be painful, but not detrimental (Griggs & Whitehead, 2015, p316). Thus these factors affected the participants to rely more on the instructor 's orders and obey what was told them to
Over the last twentieth century, there have been numerous examples in which ethical principles have not been considered in research leading to ethical breaches that have negative implications on study participants.1 One US human experimentation study which breached ethical conduct was the US Public Health Service Syphilis Study, more commonly known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which was conducted from 1932 through 1972.2 The study recruited 399 African-American male subjects diagnosed with syphilis. The recruited men came from poor, rural counties around Tuskegee, Alabama. The stated purpose of the study was to obtain information about the course of untreated syphilis. The study was initially meant to be for 6 months, however the study was modified into a “death as end-point study”.8,9
Looking beyond the Nuremberg Code and applying it to modern medical research ethics, there are many challenges that it poses. Many have argued that the Code tries to provide for all unforeseen events, which restricts the researcher by requiring him to anticipate every situation, demanding the impossible. The most important contribution of the Code is the first principle, which says that voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. The subject involved should have legal capacity to give consent, should have free power of choice, as well as sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the experiment. This restricts that populations upon which some experiment may be conducted, since many do not have “legal capacity”. For instance, studies of mental illness and children’s diseases have been curtailed because neither of these populations has the legal capacity to give consent. Another group of people, prisoners, are never really able to give voluntary consent since they might be enticed by financial rewards, special treatment, and the hope of early release in exchange for participating in the human experimentation projects. British biostatitcian Sir Austin Bradford Hill also questioned whether it was important to inform a research subject who was receiving a placebo since it does...
The Little Albert experiment has become a widely known case study that is continuously discussed by a large number of psychology professionals. In 1920, behaviorist John Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner began to conduct one of the first experiments done with a child. Stability played a major factor in choosing Albert for this case study, as Watson wanted to ensure that they would do as little harm as possible during the experiment. Watson’s method of choice for this experiment was to use principles of classic conditioning to create a stimulus in children that would result in fear. Since Watson wanted to condition Albert, a variety of objects were used that would otherwise not scare him. These objects included a white rat, blocks, a rabbit, a dog, a fur coat, wool, and a Santa Claus mask. Albert’s conditioning began with a series of emotional tests that became part of a routine in which Watson and Rayner were determining whether other stimuli’s could cause fear.
Following the ethical codes and getting approval from the Institutional Review Board (if the study has human subjects) can really decrease the possibility of any harm being done to the participants. A perfect example of a research study that had lots of things unethical practices was the Tuskegee Syphilis study:
Jhon B Watson, a behaviorist, conducted an experiment inspired by the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov to determinate the classical condition in humans. Little Albert experiment was conducted in a 9 month old baby whom a rat is showed to see his r...
...first started out with cats being exposed to mild shocks accompanied by specific sounds and visual stimuli. The cats connected the shocks with the sounds or visual stimuli that produced fear in them. When the cats were exposed to the same sounds or visual stimuli plus receiving food instead of shocks, they eventually unlearned their fears. Eventually this behavior therapy would be applied to humans.
Unethical experiments have occurred long before people considered it was wrong. The protagonist of the practice of human experimentation justify their views on the basis that such experiments yield results for the good of society that are unprocurable by other methods or means of study ( Vollmann 1448 ).The reasons for the experiments were to understand, prevent, and treat disease, and often there is not a substitute for a human subject. This is true for study of illnesses such as depression, delusional states that manifest themselves partly by altering human subjectivity, and impairing cognitive functioning. Concluding, some experiments have the tendency to destroy the lives of the humans that have been experimented on.