Ethics in Psychology Research

Overview

Source: Laboratories of Gary Lewandowski, Dave Strohmetz, and Natalie Ciarocco—Monmouth University

When a researcher finds an interesting topic to study such as aggression, the goal is often to study it in a way that is as true to life as possible. However, researchers must act in an ethical manner. To do this, they must balance their research goals with the best interests of the participants. Ethics often enter into the planning process when researchers identify all of the ways they can manipulate or measure a variable, but then make their final decision based on how they should manipulate or measure a variable.

After receiving a poor grade on a test or paper, a college student may appear to take it out on (i.e., act in an aggressive manner toward) their roommates by being mean or nasty, screaming, throwing things, or even becoming physically violent. Aggression is an important human behavior to study and understand due to the implications it has for interpersonal violence. However, for safety reasons, a study cannot expose participants to the risk that serious types of violence presents. As a result, researchers must identify similar but benign behaviors that can help us understand more aggressive behaviors without harming participants.

This video uses a two-group experiment to see if people really take out their anger on others even though the others are not responsible for the original problem. Specifically, it examines whether negative feedback leads to aggression while considering key ethical issues such as harm to participants, costs vs. benefits, informed consent, and debriefing.

Psychological studies often use higher sample sizes than studies in other sciences. A large number of participants helps to better ensure that the population under study is better represented, i.e., the margin of error accompanied by studying human behavior is sufficiently accounted for. In this video we demonstrate this experiment using just two participants, one being the evaluator. However, as represented in the results, we used a total of 245 participants to reach the experiment’s conclusions.

Procedure

1. Define ethical behavior in research.

Ethics are a collection of moral standards and principles that guide the decisions we make. They essentially tell us what we should do. What the researcher could do is different from what they should do.
Cost-Benefit Analysis: To know if the research should be conducted, the researcher needs to make sure the benefits outweigh the costs or risks of harm. This can be accomplished by increasing participants’ benefits and/or lowering the costs.

Results

The data were collected from 245 participants. Recall that the aggression scale was calculated on the number assigned to each of the drinks, which varied in levels of distasteful flavor. A t-test for independent means was run to compare the negative and neutral feedback conditions to determine how they influenced aggression. The results indicated that participants who received the negative feedback generally chose more noxious drinks for the innocent person in the other room (the friend of the evaluator), which is an ind

Application and Summary

This two-group experiment shows how researchers can study sensitive topics in an ethical way that minimizes harm to participants, while still allowing participants to engage in an aggressive behavior.

As they study human behavior, psychologists often seek to analyze undesirable and troubling behavior. For example a recent study in Psychology of Popular Media Culture found that when video-game players lost a game, they were more likely to act aggressively by trash-talking.¹

References

Harmon-Jones, E., & Sigelman, J. State anger and prefrontal brain activity: Evidence that insult-related relative left-prefrontal activation is associated with experienced anger and aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 80 797-803 (2001).
Breuer, J., Scharkow, M., & Quandt, T. Sore losers? A reexamination of the frustration–aggression hypothesis for collocated video game play. Psychology of Popular Media Culture. (2013).