Discuss ethical issues involving human participants in psychology

Milgram’s experiment is also criticised because it involved deception. Although the participants all consented to take part in the experiment, they were unaware of what the exact aim was and they were told that it was an experiment into learning techniques. This was an example of active deception as participants were misled about the purpose of the experiment and their role in it. Milgram argued that, if the findings had been different and it was found that the participants were not so socially obedient then there would have been little ethical issues raised.  Milgram argues that all participants were given the right to withdraw. On the other hand, when participants tried to leave the experiment room or asked to stop, the experimenter encouraged them to continue, saying that the whole experiment would be ruined if they left. This was an example of verbal coercion because he was making the participants feel like they couldn’t leave even though they could and it can be argued that this was also unethical.

Another study that holds ethical issues is Zimbardo’s prison experiment. Despite gaining full informed consent from participants, there were still some things they didn’t know about, such as the fact that they would be arrested at home. One major problem was that he took part in the experiment, which allowed him to get carried away and so he had no clear outlook on when the experiment should have been stopped. The participants suffered serious psychological harm, and even though they were given the right to withdraw, because the experiment was so realistic many felt that they couldn’t. Zimbardo argued that he carried out a daylong debriefing session after the experiment but despite this he still failed to stop physical and psychological harm. It can be argued that the experiment shouldn’t have been allowed because Zimbardo was fully aware of what might happen – he had conducted a pilot study previously. Since these experiments, stricter codes of conduct have been issued in order to make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen again. The findings of the experiment and their application to society must outweigh any ethical issues for participants, and it seems that both Milgram and Zimbardo weren’t valid enough to reach conclusions. Psychologists have criticised Zimbardo’s experiment, suggesting that it held demand characteristics and people just acted as they do in films rather than in a real-life prison. This indicates that they weren’t justified.

Another study that holds serious ethical issues is Humphrey’s study into understudied relationships. He pretended to be a ‘watchqueen’ in a ‘tearoom’, a public toilet where homosexual men meet for sex. Humphreys made a note of the license plate numbers of the visitors to the tearoom. He then accesses the addresses of the car owners and interviewed them at home, claiming to be a health services worker. This study is unethical because, not only is it undertaken on a very sensitive issue but the participants had no idea they were in an experiment; there was lack of informed consent, deception and invasion of privacy.