Introduction
In the study concerning the strange situation, children are separated from their parents and left with a stranger. An ethical consideration for this situation would be the consideration that the child gets upset and distressed. Research participants that involve children with parental ascent should ensure that the levels of distress caused to children are neither prolonged nor of any health effects.
Discussion
The second experiment with children sought to determine whether children can learn aggression through observation. In this study, the ethical consideration of the study researchers should be particular to the first group of children exposed to aggressive behavior. The Bandura experiment revealed that children exposed to aggressive adult behaviors are more likely to manifest aggression (OurCommunityYouth, 2020). It is ethical for study investigators to consider the long-term effects on such children and any potential risks to their overall behavior after the experiment. It is ethical to lay up measures to counter any behavior threats to the children.
The eyewitness experiment is the third, which examines how leading questions influence eyewitness testimony. One of the most critical ethical requirements when conducting research with human participants is to ensure the study does not expose them to risk and harm. In this experiment, the risk and harm the researcher should minimize is the potential of the participants questioning their observation skills and abilities which narrows down to their self-esteem.
The Stanford prison experiment is the fourth in the list whose study investigators ought to deploy research ethics. The study part involved arresting the student participants by the city police against their knowledge (OurCommunityYouth, 2020). Research ethics demand that study participants know all the research details, which constitutes informed consent (Isaacs et al., 2022). This study breached the ethical need for informed consent when they conducted an arrest of the study participants by the city police against their knowledge. The study turned the participants into mindlessly obedient zombies or people with episodes of emotional breakdown. The research should have put in place measures to reduce such emotional and psychological effects on their study participants.
Milgram’s experiment on obedience in psychology did not meet the most fundamental ethical research ethics while dealing with human participants. In his study, the participants did not have informed consent, which is deception (OurCommunityYouth, 2020). Additionally, parts of the participants were inflicted with bodily harm of up to 450 volts of electricity. The study should have made ethical considerations of eliminating and minimizing risks to study participants and providing informed consent to participants.
Position on the Ethics Behind Research with Human Participants
Research ethics provides guidelines for conducting research responsibly. In order to achieve a high ethical standard, it also instructs and oversees scientists performing research. The general guidelines for ethical research involving human participants require a list of bare minimums. The study investigators must administer informed consent, minimize risk to participants, ensure confidentiality, shun deception, and provide rights to withdraw from the study if it causes discomfort (Barrow et al., 2022). These guidelines ensure that all participants are safe and that their rights to participate in a study are based on their willingness to participate. Therefore, study investigators dealing with human subjects must subject their research to scrutiny and investigation by legal authorities for any breaches. Additionally, investigators must provide certification that shows they are qualified to conduct research studies with human participants to avoid potential ethical misconduct.
Concerns or Benefits of Such Research
These experiments prove human nature and how they respond to various stimuli. As such, they illuminate how other people have to be handled. In this way, these researches contribute to the body of knowledge in psychology on the best ways to handle human behavior to produce the most desirable outcomes. On the other hand, these experiments have several concerns that future research should consider. The level of psychological harm induced into the lives of the study participants is way too unbearable. In such situations, future study investigators should put in place measures to minimize severe psychological trauma that may result from the experiments. Among the measures of minimizing such risks to the study participants should be monitoring the long-term effects of such experiments on the study participants.
Other Thoughts
Social psychology research provides evidence concerning human behavior, which is rare in other research. There are rare cases in which the requirements of these social psychology researchers would need to breach ethical codes of research. Examples are the study of the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s experiment on obedience (OurCommunityYouth, 2020). In such cases, every participating entity should be informed of the extent of the research studies. For instance, legal authorities manning research studies within the country, the study participants, and the study investigators must all be informed accurately about the study’s design. In this way, all the study participants who choose to participate in the investigation do so willingly and not under compulsion (Barrow et al., 2022). Even so, the study participants must be given the liberty to withdraw if the developments of the study make them uncomfortable for any reason.
References
Barrow, J. M., Brannan, G. D., & Khandhar, P. B. (2022). Research ethics. In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing. Web.
Isaacs, T., Murdoch, J., Demjén, Z., & Stevenson, F. (2022). Examining the language demands of informed consent documents in patient recruitment to cancer trials using tools from corpus and computational linguistics. Health, 26(4), 431-456. Web.
OurCommunityYouth. (2020). Classic studies in psychology. YouTube. Web.