Ethics in Psychology

        Ethics are very important when carrying out any type of psychological research. Researchers have a moral responsibility to protect research participants from harm. The code of ethics in psychology provides guidelines for the conduct of research. Some of the more important ethical issues that it addresses are as follows:

• Informed Consent, as in,before the study begins the researcher must outline to the participants what the research is about, and then ask their consent (i.e. permission) to take part.
• Honesty, meaning that participants must be given information relating to the purpose of the research, procedures involved, all possible risks and discomforts to the subject, benefits of the research to society and possibly to the individual human subject, as well as length of time the subject is expected to participate and a person to contact for answers to questions or in the event of injury or emergency.
• Debriefing, as the subjects must be given a general idea of what the researcher was investigating and why, and their part in the research should be explained. They must be told if they have been previously deceived and given reasons why. They must be asked if they have any questions and those questions should be answered honestly and as fully as possible.

          However, ethics in psychology research have been disregarded until relatively recently. Many studies were conducted that lacked ethics, leading to psychological or physical harm to the participants. Due to the fact that it was not thought of as wrong to simply test on people to see what happens, there are many studies  that violate even a higher level of ethical misconduct then described before. The following two violate ethics in the whole sense of the world, not just psychology.

The Monster Study of 1939

The Monster Study was a horrid experiment done on 22 orphan children in Davenport, conducted by Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa. Johnson supervised the experiment of his graduate student, Mary Tudor. They choose to experiment on children at a nearby orphanage, and placed them in either control or experimental groups. Tudor gave positive speech therapy to half of the children, praising the fluency of their speech, and negative speech therapy to the other half, belittling the children for every speech imperfection and telling them they were stutterers. Many of the normal speaking orphan children who received negative therapy in the experiment suffered negative psychological effects and some retained speech problems during the course of their life. This experiment seems highly unethical to me, because you are experimenting with human beings to prove a theory. Other then the fact that they are orphans, and have no one to take care of them and protect them, the subjects were also children, who cannot have much control or say in situations. It is unethical to give them no say, and not care if their lives are marked with trauma, or actual speech impairment as a result. I could bet that nobody was informed of their rights during the experiment, and no care was taken care of them. Ethically speaking, this study can be compared to bulling or child abuse.

.

 

The Aversion Project of the 1970s and 1980s

South Africa’s apartheid army forced white lesbian and gay soldiers to undergo ‘sex-change’ operations in the 1970′s and the 1980′s, and submitted many to chemical castration, electric shock, and other unethical medical experiments. Although the exact number is not known, former apartheid army surgeons estimate that as many as 900 forced ‘sexual reassignment’ operations may have been performed between 1971 and 1989 at military hospitals, as part of a top-secret program to root out homosexuality from the service.
Army psychiatrists aided by chaplains aggressively ferreted out suspected homosexuals from the armed forces, sending them discretely to military psychiatric units. Those who could not be ‘cured’ with drugs, aversion shock therapy, hormone treatment, and other radical ‘psychiatric’ means were chemically castrated or given sex-change operations. Although several cases of lesbian soldiers abused have been documented so far—including one botched sex-change operation—most of the victims appear to have been young, 16 to 24-year-old white males drafted into the apartheid army.
In my eyes, this is wrong beyond limits. This study completely disregarded ethics, and used soldiers as guinea pigs to see if homosexuality can be cured. Other then the fact that most of them were drugged, shocked and psychologically traumatized beyond respectful human behavior, the soldiers that were refusing to submit themselves, had physical operations done to them, in the means of a sex change, without their approval. Imagine a young man, in his 20's, signing up for the army to help his country and make his family proud. Not only is the army a stressful enough, and psychologically challenging situation, they accused men of being gay, and in my eyes tortured them, without any reason. If you didn't want gays in the army, let them go home.