Ethical Guidelines in Research?

Question

Can some please explain how we are to every learn human nature if there are ethical guidelines, into the way studies can be preformed?
If we can't make an controled experiment to test different behaviors of the human race, how can we better learn it?

You've mostly likely heard of the Prison Experiment. I belive the experiment should have been full seen through, that way you can really understand what happened.

I just belive we should be able to test other humans, without having to follow ethical guidelines.

Does anyone else agree with me?

Answer 1

I do not agree. Would you like to have big problems because you volunteered for an experiment?

Yes, we did learn a lot from the experiments of Zimbardo (Stanford Prison exp) or Milgram (among others), but some people got real problems because they participated in these experiments. Should we allow experiments to harm people? If so, how much harm would be the maximum limit? Do you think it would be easy to get people to volunteer if psychological experiments were known to harm people? Would you participate if you heard about experiments harming people? How would we study many other interesting phenomenons if people didn't volunteer for the (harmful) experiments?

An extreme example:
Say we would like to study the effect of a mothers use of cigarettes or alcohol during pregnancy. Most research support the idea that these are very harmful for the unborn. But it hasn't been supported by a controlled experiment. Shouldn't we make an experiment of this and see which babies got later problems? Would this be OK? Is it more important with research than the health of people?

Another drawback is that people would understand that each time they come to a experiment, their minds would be "tricked" or they would be lied to in some way. Maybe people would behave differently and making the experiments LESS like "the true nature of humans"?

Phenomenons which are unethical to study in a controlled experiment are usually studied in other ways, like naturalistic observation, correlation studies, qualitative research, surveys etc.

My opinion is that it would be unwise (or plain stupid) to risk that volunteers get harmed. It would ultimately harm research. There are a lot of other research methods than controlled studies, in some aspects they are better than controlled studies, in some aspect they are worse. We need to use those methods available rather than trying to push limits for those not available.

Answer 2

The Prison experiments even had guidelines and still ended up pretty nasty, though such phenomena occurrs naturally in human nature. If you've taken any psych classes, you will notice that ethics become extremely important...it would thus be unwise to perform experiments without some code of ethics.

Answer 3

The whole point of science is to benefit humanity. It's thus counterproductive to undertake a procedure that presents a high risk of emotional distress and scarring (or even physical harm) for its participants.

There are plenty of creative, subtle ways by which to study human behavior.

And the topic need not investigate what makes humanity fearful, dishonest, nasty, selfish, ugly, or cruel.

Answer 4

The prison experiment was silly. They should have known it was just role playing. Damn pusses.

But yeah, I agree with you to an extent. But there are plenty of ways to study human nature while also doing it ETHICALLY.

Answer 5

organic study relies upon on and builds upon good results of previous works. status on the shoulders of giants to work out farther. regrettably, components are tight and researcher are under commercial rigidity to post or perish. and there is quite some BS technology available. Vetting all that makes progression very slow - or worse can intentionally misguide to waste somebody's time. technology has no ethical severe floor whilst in comparison with different human endeavors - even though it may be advantageous to be waiting to apply the "concepts" to concentration on progression quite than police the area.