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Discussing Ethical Issues in Psychological Research
Harold Herzog, Ph.D.
Western Carolina University
CONCEPT:
- Psychologists commonly confront ethical issues related to the treatment of participants in research projects. Federal law mandates that behavioral and biomedical research be reviewed by either an Institutional Review Board (IRB) in the case of research with human subjects or an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) if the research involves animal subjects. This exercise is to heighten student awareness of ethical issues posed by psychological research by having groups of students assume the role of an IRB or IACUC. The students are charged with discussing the costs, benefits, and ethical issues raised by hypothetical research proposals and deciding whether to approve or reject the research.
MATERIALS:
- Materials: Each group of students is given a proposal to evaluate. The proposals should be kept to two or three paragraphs and should be specific and reasonably realistic. Here are some samples. 1. Your committee is the State University IRB. Dr. Jones is interested in the effect of stress on performance on the McCord Intelligence Test. She feels that the test, which is very widely used in public schools, gives misleadingly low scores to kids under stress. She wants to divide her subjects (college students) into two groups of 20 each. All subjects will take a bogus pretest and will be given their "results." The experimental group will be told that they failed the test and that it is surprising that they were able to do well enough in high school to get into college. The control group will be told that they passed the test with flying colors. All of the students will then be given the real McCord IQ test. Dr. Jones' hypothesis is that the experimental group will not do as well on the IQ test as the control group. At the end of the experiment, all students will be debriefed and told that the pretest was not real and explained the true purpose of the study. What issues are raised by this study? Approve or reject?
- 2. Your group is the IACUC at State University. Professor King is a psychobiologist working on transplantation of brain tissue, a new and exciting research area at the cutting edge of biopsychology. Previous studies have shown that neural tissue can be removed from the brains of monkey fetuses and implanted into the brains of monkeys that have suffered brain damage. Dr. King wants to conduct an experiment in which he will transplant neural tissue from monkey embryos into the entorhinal cortex, an area which appears to be associated with Alzheimer's disease.
- The experiment will involve 20 adult rhesus monkeys as subjects and 20 pregnant females whose embryos will be used to supply the neural tissue. First, all the subject monkeys will be subjected to ablation surgery. This procedure will involve anesthetizing the animals, opening their skulls, and making lesions in the entorhinal cortex. Three months later, the experimental group consisting of 10 of the animals will be given transplant surgery. The pregnant females will be operated on and their embryos removed. Neural tissue taken from the embryos will be immediately implanted into the area of the brain damage in the experimental subjects. The 10 control animals will be subjected to sham surgery. All of the monkeys will then be allowed to recover for 2 months. Finally, the animals will be given a learning task to test the hypothesis that the animals having brain grafts will show better memories than the control group.
- According to Dr. King, this research is in the exploratory stages and can only be done using animals. He feels that this research will be a significant step toward developing a treatment for the devastating memory loss that afflicts Alzheimer's victims. What issues are raised by this study? Approve or reject?
INSTRUCTIONS:
- Divide the class into groups of between five and seven students. Appoint one student in each group to be leader and give them the proposal to read aloud to the group. Students should be instructed to attend only to the ethics of the proposal not to technical details such as the appropriateness of the control groups or random selection of subjects. Inform them that the purpose of the exercise is to elicit discussion on ethical issues and that they should not simply take a straw poll as soon as they read the proposal. In addition, they should try to reach a consensus. The discussion leader should take notes on the major points raised by the committee and record the final decision. After the committees have made their decisions, have the class regroup. Each group leader should briefly describe the proposal that they evaluated, their decision and their reasoning.
DISCUSSION:
- This technique can be modified to elicit discussion on a wide variety of controversial issues in psychology besides the ethics of research (e.g., involuntary institutionalization, homosexuality, confidentiality, etc). _
REFERENCES:
- Herzog, H.A. (1990). Discussing animal rights and animal research in the classroom. Teaching of Psychology, 17, 90-94.
Bolt, M. (1995). Instructors resource manual for David Myer's Psychology (4th Ed, 1995). Chapter 1: Introducing Psychology._
The above activity was originally published in the Nov/Dec 1996 issue of The Psychology Teacher Network. The activity is reprinted here with the permission of the Education Directorate of the APA. Further publication of the activity is not permitted without the express written consent of the Education Directorate.
For information on subscribing to The Psychology Teacher Network, write to:
- Psychology Teacher Network
Education Directorate
APA
750 First Street, NE,
Washington, DC 20002-4242
