Protecting Research Participants From Physical and Psychological Harm

(Ethics in Research) Protecting Research Participants From Physical and Psychological Harm

The most direct ethical concern of the behavioral scientist is the possibility that his or her research will cause harm to the research participants. Fortunately, the danger of physical harm from participation in behavioral science research is very low. Nevertheless, given scientists’ interest in studying people’s emotions, participation in behavioral research may in some cases produce rather extreme emotional reactions, and these may have long-term negative outcomes.

Types of Threats

        Some past research has posed severe threats to the psychological welfare of the participants. One example is the well-known research of Stanley Milgram (1974) investigating obedience to authority. In these studies, participants were induced by an experimenter to administer electric shocks to another person so that Milgram could study the extent to which they would obey the demands of a scientist. Most participants evidenced high levels of stress resulting from the psychological confl ict they experienced between engaging in aggressive and dangerous behavior and following the instructions of the experimenter. In another experiment (Bramel, 1962), male college students were told, on the basis of false data, that they had “homosexual tendencies.” Although it was later revealed to them that this feedback was not true, the participants may have experienced psychological stress during the course of the experiment and after it was over.

        Although studies such as those of Milgram and Bramel would no longer be conducted because the scientific community is now much more sensitized to the potential of such procedures to create emotional discomfort or harm, other studies that present less severe, but potentially real, threats are still conducted. For instance, to study the effects of failure on self-esteem or alcohol consumption, experimenters may convince research participants that they have failed on an important self-relevant task such as a test of social skills or intelligence (Hull & Young, 1983). Or to better understand the effects of depression on learning, researchers may place individuals in negative moods (Bower, 1981).

          In other cases, although the research does not directly create stressful situations, it does have the unfortunate outcome of leading the participants to discover something unpleasant about themselves, such as their tendency to stereotype others or to make unwise decisions. Although it might be argued  that the participants could make good use of this information and improve their lives from it, having found out the information might nevertheless be stressful to them, and they certainly did not ask to be told about these aspects of their personality. In still other cases, participants are led to perform behaviors that they may later be embarrassed about or ashamed of. For instance, in one experiment investigating the factors that lead college students to cheat (Kahle, 1980), a test was administered to students and the test papers collected. Then the papers were returned to the students for grading, and it was made rather easy for them to change their answers on the exam so as to improve their score. Many students did so. Unknown to the students, however, their original responses had been recorded, so that the experimenters could discover how many students cheated by changing their answers.

The Potential for Lasting Impact

Obviously, procedures that have the potential to create negative moods, stress, self-doubts, and anxiety in research participants involve some potential costs to these individuals. Although the psychological states created in these situations are assumed to be only temporary, there is no guarantee that they  will not have longer-lasting consequences. Individuals who have been induced to shock another person or to cheat on an examination may be permanently changed as a result of their participation in the research. Furthermore, these harmful psychological outcomes may not even be immediately apparent to the participant or the experimenter, but occur only later.

        Although researchers should always treat the possibility that their research will produce psychological harm seriously, and choose alternative methods of testing their research hypotheses whenever possible, fortunately most evidence suggests that participation in psychological research does not produce long-term psychological damage. For instance, even though the men in Milgram’s experiment obviously felt stress during the experiment itself, they did not report any long-term negative outcomes, nor did a team of psychiatrists fi nd any evidence of harmful effects (Milgram, 1974). In fact, the participants in social research usually report that they experienced only minor disturbances and that they learned much about themselves and about the conduct of social science from their participation. Nevertheless, there is always the possibility that at least some research participants may be psychologically hurt by participating in behavioral research.