Ethical Consideration (General)

● Informed Consent: Informed consent must be informed, voluntary, and

rational. Participants must be given relevant details to make an informed
decision, including the purpose, procedures, risks, and benefits. Consent
must be given voluntarily without undue coercion. And participants must
have the capacity to rationally weigh the decision.

● Debriefing after a study involves informing participants about the

purpose, providing an opportunity to ask questions, and addressing any
harm from participation. Debriefing serves an educational function and
allows researchers to correct misconceptions. It is an ethical imperative.
● Researchers must ensure that those participating in research will not be
caused distress. They must be protected from physical and mental harm.
This means you must not embarrass, frighten, offend or harm participants.

● Deception research involves purposely misleading participants or

withholding information that could influence their participation
decision. This method is controversial because it limits informed
consent and autonomy, but can provide otherwise unobtainable
valuable knowledge.

● Protecting participant confidentiality is an ethical imperative that

demonstrates respect, ensures honest participation, and prevents
harms like embarrassment or legal issues. Methods like data
encryption, coding systems, and secure storage should match the
research methodology.
● Participants should be able to leave a study anytime if they feel
uncomfortable. They should also be allowed to withdraw their
data. They should be told at the start of the study that they have the
right to withdraw.

● It is unethical if the costs outweigh the potential/actual benefits. However,

it isn’t easy to assess costs & benefits accurately & the participants
themselves rarely benefit from research.
There are various ethical issues that need to be taken care of while doing
research in biopsychology. There are many investigations when one has to
explore the parts and functions of the brain, how an incision could influence a
particular behavior, how damage to a particular part of the brain could have a
psychophysiological impact and so on. For such studies, as well as for studies
where there is harm to the person or where survival is at risk, animals are
preferred for [Link] human participants are selected, then the
consent is taken from the participant, the doctor(s) treating him/her,
therapist,and the caregivers. Whenever it is felt that the experiment is disturbing
the participant, or negatively influencing his/her symptoms and aggravating the
medical and psychological condition, then the experiment is immediately
[Link] the effects of chemicals, radiation, etc have to be examined
on the body, then animals are considered for such studies. Hence, animals are
used for those experiments where human beings cannot participate. There are
several ethical considerations while doing such experiments. We need to take
care of animals during and after the study is over. The conditions of doing an
experiment must be well planned, the need for the surgical procedures and
equipment must be [Link] is to say that animals must be used only
when the research in question is of great importance to mankind. No
unnecessary harm or pain must be inflicted to the animal. After the experiment
is over the animal must be taken care of untill he/she recovers.
Nonhuman Animal Subject Research
One area of controversy regarding research techniques is the use of nonhuman
animal subjects. One of the keys to behaving in an ethical manner is to ensure
that one has given informed consent to be a subject in a study. Obviously,
animals are unable to give consent. For this reason, there are some who believe
that researchers should not use nonhuman animal subjects in any case.
There are others that advocate for using nonhuman animal subjects because
nonhuman animal subjects many times will have distinct advantages over
human subjects. Their nervous systems are frequently less complex than human
systems, which facilitates the research. It is much easier to learn from a system
with thousands of neurons compared to one with billions of neurons like
humans. Also, nonhuman animals may have other desirable characteristics such
as shorter life cycles, larger neurons, and translucent embryos. However, it is
widely recognized that this research must proceed with explicit guidelines
ensuring the safe treatment of the animals. For example, any research institution
that will be conducting research using nonhuman animal subjects must have an
Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). IACUCs review the
proposed experiments to ensure an appropriate rationale for using nonhuman
animals as subjects and ensure ethical treatment of those subjects.
Furthermore, many researchers who work with nonhuman animal subjects
adhere to the Three R's: Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement (Russell &
Burch, 1959).
Replacement suggests that researchers should seek to use inanimate systems as
a replacement for nonhuman animal subjects whenever possible. Furthermore,
replacement is also suggested to replace higher level organisms with lower level
organisms whenever possible. The idea is that instead of choosing a primate to
conduct the study, researchers are encouraged to use a lower level animal such
as an invertebrate (a sea slug, for example) to conduct the study.
Reduction refers to reducing the number of nonhuman animal subjects that will
be used in the particular study. The idea here is that if a study can learn
sufficient information from one nonhuman animal, then they should only use
one.
Finally, refinement is about how the nonhuman animals are cared for. The goal
is to minimize discomfort that the subject experiences and to enhance the
conditions that the subject experiences throughout their life.
In conclusion, many researchers argue that what we have learned from
nonhuman animal subjects has been invaluable. These studies have led to drug
therapies for treating pain and other disorders; for instance, most drugs are
studied using animals first, to ensure they are safe for humans. Animal nervous
systems are used as models for the human nervous systems in many areas. Sea
slugs (Aplysia californica) have been used to learn about neural networks
involved in learning and memory. Cats have been studied to learn about how
our brain's visual system is organized. Owls have been used to learn about
sound localization in the auditory system. Indeed, research using nonhuman
animal subjects has led to many important discoveries.
Human Subject Research
What about research on human subjects? We do not have to go very far back in
history to find situations where researchers behaved in unethical ways towards
their human subjects. One of the most famous ethical violations in history is that
many experiments were conducted using concentration camp prisoners as
subjects during the holocaust.
Throughout the years, psychologists have engaged in various studies that have
pushed the envelope of ethical research, such as Milgram's study of obedience
or Zimbardo's Stanford prison study. Studies such as these have led to the
development of strict ethical guidelines for human research. As with research on
nonhuman animal subjects, there is a committee known as an Institutional
Review Board (IRB) whose role is to approve research proposals. These
committees ensure that there is an appropriate reason for completing the
research with human subjects and that the safety of the human subjects are
appropriately considered.
To further complicate matters, here in the United States, we have our own
history of when ethical violations intersected with racial/ethnic divides.
Indeed, members of some groups have historically faced more than their fair
share of the risks of scientific research, including people who are
institutionalized, are disabled, or belong to racial or ethnic minorities. A
particularly tragic example is the Tuskegee syphilis study conducted by the US
Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972 (Reverby, 2009). The participants in
this study were poor African American men in the vicinity of Tuskegee,
Alabama, who were told that they were being treated for “bad blood.” Although
they were given some free medical care, they were not treated for their syphilis.
Instead, they were observed to see how the disease developed in untreated
patients. Even after the use of penicillin became the standard treatment for
syphilis in the 1940s, these men continued to be denied treatment without being
given an opportunity to leave the study. The study was eventually discontinued
only after details were made known to the general public by journalists and
activists. It is now widely recognized that researchers need to consider issues of
justice and fairness at the societal level.

[Link]
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Ethical Issues in Research