Question

What ethical considerations should guide psychological research on humans? How should these ethical considerations differ from those guiding psychological research on non-human animals? Your response should be at least 250 words.

Answer 1

What ethical considerations should guide psychological research on humans? How should these ethical considerations differ from those guiding psychological research on non-human animals?

Ethics are the right conduct rules which are required at the time of carrying out a research. It is the moral responsibility of a person so as to protect the participants of research from any kinds of harm. The ethical considerations that should guide psychology research on humans are:

• Informed consent: it is important that when the investigators should be carrying out an experiment, they should be informing the participant about the experiment that is being carried out. In most of the psychological researches, the participants are not completely informed about the experiment they would be conducting so as to obtain natural reactions from the participant without any biases.
• Debriefing: the participants are not able to discuss procedures with the psychologist or its findings. It is important that the participants should be told that they had been deceived, and if so why. This should be done as soon as the experiment was over.
• Protection: it is important that participants should not be in any kind of stress while they are a part of the research. Mental harm as well as physical harm should be protected from. Also, researchers sometimes fail to predict what the risk of a procedure would be. For example Zimbardo’ experiment.
• Deception: researchers carry out deliberate misleading of the participants or presenting the, with wrong information so as to get accurate results.

As compared to the non human participants, they cannot debrief or they could not be deceived by providing incorrect information. As well as informed consent does not form an issue since consent is never taken. They should be given proper housing and should be taken proper care of.the research being carried out should be justifiable and the acquisition of the laboratory animals should be done in a dignified manner.