Ethical Issues in Psychology

Philip Banyard, Cara Flanagan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136588822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

How do we know right from wrong, good from bad, help from hindrance, and how can we judge the behaviour of others?

Ethics are the rules and guidelines that we use to make such judgements. Often there are no clear answers, which make this subject both interesting and potentially frustrating. In this book, the authors offer readers the opportunity to develop and express their own opinions in relation to ethics in psychology.

There are many psychological studies that appear to have been harmful or cruel to the people or animals that took part in them. For example, memory researchers carried out studies on a man who had no memory for over forty years, but because he had no memory he was never able to agree to the studies. Is this a reasonable thing to do to someone? Comparative psychologist Harry Harlow found that he could create severe and lasting distress in monkeys by keeping them in social isolation. Is this a reasonable thing to do even if we find out useful things about human distress? If you were able to use psychological techniques to break someone down so that they revealed information that was useful to your government, would you do it? If so, why? If not, why not? These ethical issues are not easy to resolve and the debates continue as we encounter new dilemmas.

This book uses examples from psychological research to look at:

• key ethical issues
• ethical guidelines of psychologists
• socially sensitive research
• ethics in applied psychology
• the use of animals in research

This book is essential reading for undergraduate and pre-undergraduate students of psychology and related subjects such as philosophy and social policy.

Rights and wrongs

1

What this chapter will teach you

What we mean by ethics

How we develop moral codes

What we mean by human rights and where they come from

The basic ideas behind professional codes of practice

In this chapter we will look at what we mean by ethics. We will consider an array of concepts such as morals, ethical issues, ethical guidelines, human rights, ethical relativism and utilitarianism, to name but a few. These can be easily confused by the reader (and by authors, to be fair) but we will try to work our way through as best we can in order to better understand how psychologists develop their ideas of right and wrong and how we end up with the ethical codes that guide our behavior.

How ethical judgements affect people

Anyone who works with people has to make judgements about how they should behave and consider what effect their behavior might have on the people they are working with. There are a lot of factors that might affect those judgements and sometimes people make decisions that later come to be questioned. The basis for these questions is usually a code of ethics. Look below at two examples of scientific studies that have raised some serious ethical concerns.

The MMR myth

In 1998 a UK medical journal, The Lancet, published a paper from a research team led by Dr. Andrew Wakefield from the Royal Free Hospital in London. The press conference that followed publication made claims of a link between the MMR vaccine (a three-in-one jab for measles, mumps and rubella) and a syndrome of bowel and brain damage in children. This report on 12 children triggered massive media attention and created the myth of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The impact of the report and the massive press coverage was to dramatically reduce the confidence of parents in the vaccine and to reduce the number of children who were given it. The number of children receiving the vaccine in the UK dropped from around 85% in 1997 to around 65% in 2003 (data from the UK Department of Health).

KEY TERMS

Ethics The rules and principles that distinguish between right and wrong, and guide our behavior.

Autism A socially disabling disorder that usually appears in early childhood and typically involves avoidance of social contact, abnormal language development, and ‘stereotypic’ or bizarre behaviors such as rocking.

The decision to immunize your baby is very important for parents who obviously do not want to do anything to harm their child. The problem with not immunizing your baby, however, is that it increases their risk of childhood diseases and this might have serious consequences. The press coverage put doubt into people's minds and a question mark appeared over the vaccine. But not everything was as it seemed.

To cut to the chase, the story ended in 2010 when Andrew Wakefield was found guilty of ethical misconduct by the UK General Medical Council (GMC). And how! (For a full review of the story you should go to the blog of Brian Deer, a Sunday Times journalist who unearthed a lot of the details; see Websites.) The GMC enquiry went on for 197 days and concluded that Wakefield was dishonest, unethical, irresponsible and callous. The original paper in The Lancet was found to be dishonestly reported and carried out on children without ethical approval.

In brief, before the research was carried out, Wakefield had made an agreement with a solicitor who was looking for evidence to use against drug companies in legal challenges. Wakefield received over half a million pounds from legal aid funds to find that evidence. He had also developed his own alternative vaccines and stood to make a fortune if the MMR vaccine was replaced. The children in the study had been recruited from groups already campaigning against the MMR vaccine. The researched procedures had not been put through the hospital ethics committee and the children were subjected to a range of intrusive procedures. Finally, the scientific data did not match the reports that Wakefield made.

It would be difficult to find a more comprehensive moral and ethical breach than this. What is even more remarkable is that some newspapers carried on ignoring the true facts and continued to support the anti-MMR vaccine campaign. There are issues about media ethics here, but that discussion is for another book.

HM

An entirely different story and one that raises some different ethical issues concerns the case of Henry Molaison, who is usually referred to as HM. Molaison died in 2008 after a lifetime of being an unknowing subject of psychological studies. The case study appears in most introductory psychology texts and concerns a man who lost the ability to remember information after a brain operation. HM is very famous in psychology and ‘… he has probably had more words written about him than any other case in neurological or psychological history’ (Ogden & Corkin, 1991, p. 195).

HM (he was always given those initials in scientific reports to protect his identity, although that might seem ironic after you read about what the psychologists did to him) was born in 1926 and had a head injury at the age of 7 that started a lifetime of epileptic seizures. These seizures got worse over the years and in his mid-20s he was having uncontrolled grand mal attacks (health-threatening seizures). It was proposed to attempt a brain operation to cure the epilepsy and a surgeon called William Scoville performed a ‘bilateral medial temporal lobe resection’ (cutting out a part of HM's brain). On the positive side, HM survived the operation and his epilepsy became less damaging, but on the very negative side he had profound retrograde and anterograde amnesia. More precisely, he had lost much of his memory for the 10 years prior to the operation (retrograde amnesia), and even more damagingly he had lost the ability to store new information (anterograde amnesia). He had about a 90-second memory span, so he was effectively waking up every 90 seconds not knowing where he was or whom he was talking to.

The operation on HM was not the first time this procedure had been carried out and the results could have been reasonably expected. The surgeon had been pioneering this technique on psychiatric patients and knew the likely consequences. Why he carried it out is not clear but there are numerous other ethical issues here about the conduct of doctors and their monitoring by colleagues. For an interesting and readable account of this study you can do no better than to look at Memory's Ghost by Philip Hilts (1996).

The operation was clearly a disaster for HM, although he probably never understood that because he could never learn what happened to him, or if he did he would forget it within a couple of minutes. This was a tragedy for HM but an opportunity for any psychologists who became aware of the case. They queued up to study HM's memory, assessing it with all kinds of tests and checking out a wide range of hypotheses concerning the theoretical distinctions between long-term and short-term memory, and between explicit and implicit memory. They used all sorts of stimuli, including electric shocks and white noise (for a review, see: Corkin, 1984; Parkin, 1996). One of ‘the most striking characteristics is that he rarely complains about anything … is always agreeable and co-operative to the point that if … asked to sit in a particular place he will do so indefinitely’ (Corkin, 1984, p. 251).

KEY TERMS

Explicit and implicit memory A way to classify different kinds of memory, distinguishing between memories of which we are aware (explicit) and those memories which are outside our conscious awareness (implicit).

Ethical issues arise in research where there are conflicts between the research goals and the participant's rights.

Informed consent The agreement given by an individual to participate in a research study or any program, based on comprehensive information concerning the nature and purpose of the study or program and their role in it. This is necessary in order that they can make an informed decision about whether to participate.

The tests continued for 40 years until HM was in his late 60s and his mental faculties were starting to show a general deterioration. One of the psychologists wrote of the major contribution this work had made to our understanding of memory and commented ‘… the fact that he has no conscious memory of this work does not in any way detract from the debt we owe him’ (Ogden & Corkin, 1991, p. 195).

The story of HM is commonly presented without comment in psychology books but ask yourself this: How did HM give consent for the 40 years of constant research and experimentation? He did not know what was being done to him or even who was doing it. Is this ground-breaking science or cruel exploitation of a man whose life has been ruined by experimental brain surgery? His brain is now kept at the University of California, San Diego, USA and sliced up into sections. Who agreed to this?

Ethical issues

These two cases highlight some central ethical issues.

1 First of all is the issue of informed consent, which refers to the idea that any participant in an experiment should be informed ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Series preface
• Preface
• 1 Rights and wrongs
• 2 Ethical issues and how to deal with them
• 3 Ethical principles and guidelines
• 4 Psychological research with human participants
• 5 Psychological research with animals
• 6 Psychology in practice
• 7 Ethics and your research project
• Glossary
• References
• Index