Long gone are the days when psychologists could make participants think they were delivering fatal electric shocks, turn students into prisoners or prison officers and simply watch what happened, or make 9-month-old babies afraid of rats (Milgram, Zimbardo and Watson respectively). Although society has learned a lot from these studies, psychology’s professional body (quite rightly) introduced clear ethical standards which researchers must attend to.
At its simplest, the essence of research ethical guidelines is to ‘do no harm’. This seems to be a clear and sensible rule of thumb and it is tempting to think of ethics as a set of rules we apply: ‘If x happens, then we do y.’ However, what happens when the world changes faster than our professional bodies can keep up?
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