Ethical Issues

Because psychological research is fundamentally concerned with real human beings, researchers are expected to follow a defined set of ethical or moral principles while carrying out any study, broadly, respect for participants' privacy and their choice about whether to take part, beneficence (protecting participants from harm), and justice (making sure the benefits of the research are shared with the participants). These broad principles are worked out in practice through five more specific standards. Voluntary participation means that the people a researcher wants to study must be free to decide, without coercion or excessive inducement, whether or not to take part, and must also remain free to withdraw at any point after the study has begun, without any penalty for doing so. Informed consent means that potential participants must be told, before any data is collected from them, what will actually happen to them during the study, so that they can make a genuinely informed decision about whether to participate; this matters especially in studies where participants might be exposed to mild electric shock, or to other obnoxious (harmful or unpleasant) stimuli, or where they may be asked to disclose private information not normally shared with others; some studies additionally use deliberate deception, giving participants false information or false feedback about themselves or their performance, and in every such case, researchers must still explain the general nature of the study to participants before it actually begins. Debriefing takes place once the study is complete: participants are given whatever information is needed to fully understand what the research was really about, which matters most when deception has been used, and it should leave participants in essentially the same physical and mental state they were in when they started, offering reassurance and actively working to remove any anxiety or other unwanted after-effects the deception may have caused. Sharing the results of the study is treated as a moral obligation on the researcher: after analysing the data and drawing conclusions back at their own workplace, the researcher is expected to go back to the participants and share what was found, which both meets participants' natural expectation of being told the outcome, and can sometimes yield the researcher fresh insight, since participants may offer their own reactions to the results. Confidentiality of data source means safeguarding participants' right to privacy by keeping whatever information they provided strictly confidential, usin …