Ethics in Research: Deception, Animal Studies, and Institutional Oversight

the topic of this lecture is ethics so one of the questions we need to consider is whether or not the ends

justify the means with regard to research so they're going to be a few different topics that we'll cover in in

this particular lecture what is going to be the question of deception and so deception is is often used in

psychological research and we'll talk about the reason why it's used as well as the pros and cons of using it and so

we'll we'll chat more about that in just a few moments we'll also talk a bit about the question

of animal research and this is a controversial issue both among psychologists as well as the public is

what are the situations that would warrant us conducting research on animals and we'll talk a bit about the

cases within psychology where we use animal models to understand something about human behavior as well as animal

behavior as well and we'll talk about the ethical standards for research that are that

have been developed by the American Psychological Association the basic idea for these ethical standards is that they

should ensure that both human and animal subjects are treated with dignity and respect and we'll we'll chat about those

standards as we go along today so let's start with the idea of deception so sometimes deception is

necessary in research to prevent participants from knowing about the actual nature of the research question

the reason for that is that if participants know what the research question is and if they know what the

researcher is expecting to find then that may influence the results so for example if going back to our our

depression example from previous lectures if we if we told participants that hey what we're going to do is we're

going to give you a real dose of the drug but the person over there we're going to give them a a placebo we don't

think that's actually going to affect their behavior but we think it will affect yours right if we're telling

everyone what condition they're actually in right people in the experimental group may expect to have some benefits

because they're being told they're being given an effective drug people in placebo group if we tell them hey we're

giving you a sugar pill this really shouldn't have any kind consequence for you they may behave differently

and so what we're interested in with with research is getting what a person's natural responses and in some cases we

can't necessarily give them all of the information about our hypotheses about the underlying Theory driving the

research we may not even just be able to tell them what condition they're in because we want their we want their

behaviors to be as naturalistic as possible right and by telling them what condition we're what condition they're

in we may be influencing their behavior so we sometimes withhold information so deception is going to refer to any

sort of purposeful misleading of the participant in order to maintain the Integrity of the experiment itself

now if there is deception that's being used in an experiment um participants then are told at the end

of data collection what's actually been going on right so they're told about the ideas and

hypotheses driving the study they may be told about the condition that they were assigned to but the debriefing procedure

is uh is intended to make sure that everyone is fully informed at least at the conclusion of the study even if we

can't tell them everything at the beginning of the study now again this doesn't mean that

deception is is a great thing to use it just means that it's the best it it oftentimes is the best vehicle that we

have to uh help us reach the the the sort of conclusion that we want which is to be able to understand how people are

behaving in these different sorts of situations or in response to different conditions

one famous example of deception being used that is a deeply unethical example is the Tuskegee syphilis study

um in this and what this study uh tells us about is first of all the ethical guidelines

um have not always existed in research there was a time when researchers were operating outside of a conventional

framework that would guide us in terms of which things are and are not acceptable to do in research

the Tuskegee syphilis study started in 1932 when black male participants were recruited for a study studying syphilis

um now what's important about this is that the participants who were recruited who tested positive were not informed

that they actually had syphilis right so they were followed over a extended period of time but they weren't told

about their disease status you know since syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease the participants

were not only at greater risk themselves but they were also at risk for infecting others

now one of the important pieces of this is that at the beginning of the study in 1932 there was no cure for Syphilis

however penicillin was discovered to be a cure for syphilis in 1947 and even though it was discovered to be a cure

for Syphilis what happened is that participants in the study were not notified of their status and they

weren't administered penicillin right so rather researchers simply continued to observe them even though a cure had been

found for their condition why one of the many reasons why this is such an unethical experiment or study is

that many of the participants unknowingly spread the disease right and many of the participants died even

though there was a cure right so there were two or well at least two issues going on one was they weren't notified

of their condition so they weren't um they weren't given the information to help them stop the spread of the disease

and then also they were simply uh monitored over time rather than given the Cure that was that came into

existence in 1947. so deeply deeply problematic study and one of the reasons why psychologists are so concerned with

ethics we want to make sure that we never accidentally do anything uh that at all resembles the the ethical uh mess

that was the Tuskegee syphilis study when conducting research involving human participants we have to adhere to really

strict guidelines and one of the institutions that are in place to help enforce these

guidelines are institutional review boards or what are referred to as irbs these groups consist of Administrators

researchers and scientists community members and other experts that serve on these boards to review proposals for

research projects involving human participants um so for example every research study

that I conduct uh involves human participants and when they when I am proposing them I have to propose them to

an Institutional review board I have to write up my procedures here's why I'm doing this why I'm doing that what I

hope to find from this research how I'm safeguarding the participants I'm safeguarding their privacy safeguarding

their safety right all these sorts of things and then the IRB will read my proposal give me feedback on we want you

to do this or that differently wanting to change this we want you to start doing that and eventually there's this

repeated process and eventually they approve the proposal and then I can execute the study as it has been

designed by me and then Modified by the IRB to make sure it meets Uh current uh guidelines for safety

um irbs existed any research institution that receives Federal support for research involving human participants so

essentially every college or university many many hospitals also have irbs and some sort uh a lot of zoos Also may have

uh irbs or Aya Cooks which we'll talk about a little bit later as well and so all these different sorts of

organizations if they are accepting federal funds to study human participants they they have to have some

sort of IRB to help make sure that ethical guidelines are maintained and generally speaking an IRB must

approve research before it can actually move forward and data can be collected the form consent is the process of

informing a research participant about what they should expect during the course of an experiment or a study and

then getting that person's permission that they that they are actually willing to consent and

participate in the study so what this is going to include will be some things like potential risks that are involved

so participants have to be told here are some of the things that could go wrong for example in a lot of studies the

things that could go wrong involve things like well you might be kind of uncomfortable with us asking you certain

types of questions you know for example if you're so for example in some of my research I I conduct research that

involves different types of sexual behaviors and so it's possible that participants may be uncomfortable with

just having to tell somebody else about their sexual preferences their sexual desires or sexual experiences right it

may just make them uncomfortable right so that's that's a risk you have the risk of being uncomfortable uh in other

studies there may be risks that involve things like their information may be discovered by someone else if they're

participating in a study with their romantic partner as part of a romantic diet it's possible that their partner

could see them completing the the survey or something of that sort so you have to outline the risks to the participants

you have to talk about the implications of the research like what could this research possibly mean going forward now

in some cases researchers don't necessarily know how their research could be used but if there are any clear

implications like could this be helpful for other people who suffer from depression for example

participants need to be notified their participation is voluntary right we're not coercing them or forcing them uh to

to be in the study and they have to be told that any data that's collected will be kept

confidential so for example in the sort of research that I do I tend to collect data from large numbers of participants

hundreds or in some cases thousands of participants and when I present those results in paper and journal articles or

at scientific conferences I don't talk about the results of any particular participants gave rather what I do is I

talk about the aggregate right what's going on with the entire sample of hundreds or thousands of people right so

in that way I'm not I'm not violating confidentiality or I'm not talking about what John Smith said right rather what

I'm talking about is across 500 participants right here are the sorts of patterns that we see in the data

we also want to address research that involves animal subjects so I've mentioned that my research is focused

exclusively on humans but my wife is a comparative psychologist here at Oakland and so she does a lot of work with

animal subjects she works with rats she works with gorillas at the Detroit Zoo she works with lions all sorts of

different species so her work commonly involves working with animals 90 percent of psychological research

that uses uh animal subjects tend to use either rodents or birds with by far the most common participant or subject in

these sorts of animal studies being rats so rats are very very common animal model used in a lot of psychological

research now again this doesn't mean that 90 of psychology studies use rodents of birds it means that if

animals are used in Psychology studies then ninety percent of those studies tend to use common animals like like

rats or Birds pigeons in many cases part of the reason why animals are used so often in Psychology research is

because many of their basic processes are similar enough to humans that we can use them as models for humans so for

example depending on the organism that we're looking at in some cases areas of their brains may work in ways that are

similar enough to humans that we can extrapolate and generalize some of the information found with these animal

models to humans so for example it's not uncommon for researchers who are working in basic areas like for example in

addictions to do to perform experiments on Lab Rats for example to get them addicted to particular substances and

then see if certain drugs can help kind of mitigate the impact of addiction and if they're successful in rap models then

the ideas we can start moving them into other animal models that are closer and closer to humans before eventually doing

human trials so animals are often used in research when it would be unethical for us to use

human participants so in really early phases of testing new medications for example or new surgical techniques it's

not uncommon to use animal models in those sorts of cases now despite the fact that researchers

are still using animals in these sorts of situations it's still imperative that they do everything they can to minimize

the pain or the distress of the animal there are certainly those uh who who disagree with using animal subjects in

any capacity in research and it's something that people still disagree about right there are there are there

are organizations that say that animals should never be used as as subjects in any sort of research regardless of the

benefits for them or for humans some people say that it's okay to use animals and research if the research will

eventually be beneficial to others of their species but it it's not helpful for humans some people say it's okay to

use animals for research that to be beneficial either to other animals of their kind or to humans so there are a

variety of perspectives right there is no single right or wrong answer there are a lot of different competing

interests and it's important for us to think about which things we value in terms of our

moral stance on these sorts of issues there are bodies that institutions called an Institutional Animal Care and

use committee it's called an Aya cook and this is going to be a similar sort of group to what the institutional

review board or IRB does except the iacook is going to be involved in in reviewing research proposals that

involve non-human animals so for example if I'm conducting a study looking at uh personality in humans my research would

be reviewed by an Institutional review board an IRB if my wife is going to do a study at the Detroit Zoo looking at for

example the the cognitive abilities of gorillas right since her work is focusing on non-human animals her work

would be reviewed by an Aya cook instead right the iacook is going to be they're essentially the Safeguard to make sure

that researchers are adhering to the ethical standards for any sort of research involving non-human species