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IB SL/HL Psychology (biological approaches to behaviour): ethical considerations related to research taking biological approaches to understand behaviour£5.49
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IB SL/HL Psychology (biological approaches to behaviour): ethical considerations related to research taking biological approaches to understand behaviour
Discuss ethical considerations related to research studies at the BLOA [22]
Ethical considerations are requirements that have been put in place to help protect
participants involved in psychological studies. They ensure that the participant does
not experience more psychological harm than they would experience in everyday life,
as well as making sure the participant is informed as to what they are taking part in.
Due to the nature of the BloA, researchers often put participants in situations to elicit
a biological response, or manipulate the biology of the participant (e.g. injecting with
a hormone.) As a result of this, there are many ethical considerations that must be
taken into account when designing an experiment in this field. Breaches to this ethical
conduct must go through an ethics committee who decide whether the possible
psychological damage is less than the possible advantage to psychology.
One ethical consideration in the BLoA is deception. This includes informed consent
and can lead to psychological damage. By using deception, researchers can
investigate psychological phenomena without such a high risk of participant
expectations affecting the results and their validity. Deception can be used to place
participants in experimental and control groups without them knowing which they
group they were in. This reduces participant expectations, as it would highlight if a
placebo effect was taking place. Therefore, deception allows researchers to test more
natural behaviour, and to establish a cause and effect relationship, as it ensures that
the results gained are due to the independent variable. However, it involves lying to
the participant which is ethically wrong, as well as negatively affecting informed
consent, as the participant cannot truly know what they are signing up for. This also
leads to an increased chance of psychological damage to the participants- due either
from being lied to by the researcher or by being asked to do something they were not
expecting.
An example of a study in the BLoA using deception is Newcomer et al’s study aiming
to investigate the effect of cortisol levels on verbal declarative memory. In order to
establish a cause and effect relationship, Newcomer split the self-selected participants
into three groups. These groups consisted of a control, a high stress group and a low
stress group. The control was injected with a placebo, the high stress group were
given 160mg of cortisol daily (the equivalent of a major stressful event), and the low
stress group were given 40mg of cortisol daily (the equivalent of a minor stressful
event.) After being in the conditions for four days, the participants were asked to
perform a verbal declarative memory test. The results showed that the placebo and
low stress group showed no memory change, however the high stress group’s
performance significantly decreased. This study uses a placebo, as well as not telling
the participants how much cortisol they were being given which is an example of
deception. Although deception allowed the researcher to ensure the cortisol was the
real cause for the decrease in declarative memory performance, it also meant not
telling the participants the entire truth of what they would experience. As neither
participants nor researchers knew which group were given which cortisol dosage (due
to the use of a double-blind study), participant and researcher effects were drastically
reduced. Participants must be debriefed after the experiment to inform them which
group they were in. They would be informed of the existence of all groups and
therefore would know that there was a possibility of them being in any of the three
which would have reduced any psychological damage from the deception in this
study. Therefore, although there were breaches to ethical conduct in this study, the
benefit to psychological knowledge outweighed the minor stress that may have been
caused by the deception, as the psychological damage was minimal yet the results
are significant.
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