Discuss the balance of scientific benefit versus ethical costs in psychology.

Discuss the balance of scientific benefit versus ethical costs in psychology.
It is argued that any psychological research should be done on the basis of a cost-benefit approach: determining whether the benefits for society the study may generate outweigh the ethical costs that participants in the research may experience.
Selye’s GAS theory research is an example of a controversial study. Selye aimed to determine the consequences on the physical body when we are put under stress in our everyday lives. After exposing rats to various noxious agents including extremely cold environments, surgical injury, cutting their spinal cords, excessive muscular exercise, and intoxications with sub lethal doses of diverse drugs such as morphine, Selye found that in the first 6-48 hours all rats had physical issues such as ulcers. He then found that if the treatment was continued the appearance and function of the internal organs returned to normal, and treatment was continued indefinitely until they entered the ‘exhaustion’ stage where the immune system was unable to cope thus resulting in mental and physical illness. There were many obvious ethical costs in Selye’s research, as the rats suffered from extreme physical harm and in some cases death – the study could have been done differently in perhaps a less extreme manner. Cutting the spinal cord, for instance, firstly would obviously cause extreme stress to the body and will most likely lead to death, and secondly is not an everyday stressor, therefore there study may be argued as unethical because it wasn’t necessary to use such harsh methods to investigate the aims of the study. As well as this, rats as animals are much more vulnerable because they can’t give consent, express pain or right to withdraw. There is also the issue of the lack of ecological validity because rats are clearly not human beings and so may respond differently to stress, thus the findings weren’t completely generalizable to human beings, again questioning the necessity of the study.
On the other hand, Selye’s research is said to have provided a generalizable reaction to stress and it has lead psychologists to providing an understanding of what happens to the body when under stress. It has also lead to more research being done into such behaviour and has had positive implications in the world – for example, we now know that heart disease can be caused by prolonged stress, therefore we know how to treat it. As a result, it could be argued that the saving of thousands of human lives is worth harming a few rats.
Milgram’s study is another example of research with many ethical costs. The aim of the study was to test the ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis after the disastrous Holocaust period, and so Milgram paid individuals to take part in what they were lead to believe was an experiment developing research into ‘learning’ when in reality it was looking at obedience. The naïve participant was placed in a room with an electric shock device and was told to provide an electric shock every time the other ‘participant’ – a confederate of the experiment placed in another room– got an answer to a test wrong, going higher in voltage each time. Firstly, an obvious ethical issue of this study is that of the lack of consent and deception due to the use of a confederate, the fact that the electric shocks were false, and the true aim of the experiment being hidden from the participant. As well as this, the BPS guideline of participant’s right to withdraw was breached in the way that participants may have felt pressured into staying and completing the study as they had been paid and the ‘experimenter’ was giving instructions such as ‘the experiment requires you to continue’. This also had the potential to result in psychological harm because it could have increased their anxiety levels. Participants did in fact suffer from significant harm – 3, in fact, had physical seizures, and many looked visibly distressed by digging their fingers into the palms, nervously laughing and so on. A fourth ethical issue with Milgram’s study is that there is lack of ecological validity in generalising his findings to everyday life because it is rare that we are asked to give others electric shocks. Obedience is more likely to be measured in the relationship between a parent and their child or a teacher and their student and so on, individuals following much milder orders such as completing housework or homework.
Despite this, Milgram’s study triggered a large number of subsequent studies which have helped us refine our understanding of obedience, such as Hofling et al’s study – aimed at providing a more realistic version of Milgram’s study by doing a field experiment on nurses who were given orders from a false and unknown 'doctor' over the telephone to administer a dose of medication above the maximum allowed. It was demonstrated that a shocking 21 out of 22 nurses were easily influenced into carrying out the orders, concluding that people are very unwilling to question supposed 'authority', even when they might have good reason to. This is seen as a very important study because it made people even more aware of how authority figures can lead an individual astray, even in an institution as significant as a hospital which saves peoples lives: influenced by Milgram’s study. Thus, Milgram’s study lead to providing us with even more research and a better look into obedience and human behaviour, therefore the scientific benefits for society surely outweigh the ethical costs of the study. It can also be argued that the benefits of Milgram’s study was worth the ethical costs because it was counter-intuitive – his initial interviews prior to the study suggested that people wouldn’t be willing to obey unjust orders, but the study proved how important situational factors are. To add to this, the study reduced prejudices towards German people, and 80% of participants had no regrets about taking part in the study, and 70% said they had ‘learnt something of lasting value’. Surely, with the given welfares for society the study provided, and the happiness of the participants after the study, the ethical costs are of no value compared to the benefits.
Humphrey’s ‘tearoom trade’ study investigated the sexual orientation of men in 1970, at a time when homosexual relationships weren’t considered ‘normal’. Humphrey acted as a ‘watchqueen’ outside public toilets where males would meet fellow males for casual sex, and observed the type of men going in. Two immediate ethical issues with this study is firstly the use of deception in a place people clearly wanted privacy and they didn’t realise they were being observed (this also means that informed consent from the participants wasn’t given), and secondly the breach of participant’s privacy because Humphrey noted down the men’s car registration plates and followed them up a year later, visiting their homes as a disguised ‘health worker’. Humphrey could also have been putting the men at risk of psychological harm in the way that they could have felt incredibly uncomfortable with a stranger knowing their private sexual life and where the results may have been published, perhaps this may have led to paranoia and developed to cause a breakdown within their ‘day’ relationships – their heterosexual marriages and so on.
However, Humphrey’s study provided important insight into the lives of men at the time: he concluded that some men could be ‘gay at night and straight in the day’. Although there was lack of informed consent this avoided demand characteristics within the study thus making the results more valid and consequently making them more likely to be accepted – providing more research into such human behaviour. Despite this, the study seemed to breach many BPS guidelines and put the participants at risk of significant harm and compared to the lack of social benefits the study provided it seems to be that the study was almost un-necessary and, overall, the ethical costs outweigh the benefits.
The case study of HM investigated an individual’s memory after an operation that removed his hippocampus in an attempt to reduce severe epilepsy, in order to provide research into the separate memory stores and the role of the hippocampus. This helped provide insight into the physiology of the brain and as a result, evidence that might encourage more precise psychosurgery. Nevertheless, very similar information has been gained from more anonymous studies of participants – either with amnesia or brain scans of healthy participants performing different tasks, and so the necessity of the study is questioned. There is also the issue of lack of generalizability because HM’s case is individual and so findings can’t accurately be applied to every human being. HM was unable to remember any new information for approximately 90+ seconds and so couldn’t truly give any informed consent, arguably exploiting a very vulnerable individual, again being a strong ethical issue. As well as this, HM’s brain was given to the University of California for research when he died – this is strongly unethical because he was incapable of giving any informed consent whatsoever and no measure of HM’s personal interests were taken into account. Therefore although the results of HM’s case study are intriguing it is almost seen as unnecessary because research using more reliable technology has been done otherwise and so the social benefits for society are outweighed by the ethical costs of the study.
To conclude, I believe that although most psychological studies, to a certain degree, have ethical costs for participants, psychology experiments usually provide society with a great deal of information about human behaviour that furthers or understanding of it which can lead to better treatments and so on. With BPS guidelines set in place now, no experiment is too extreme and involves too many ethical costs, and each experiment has an aim of making things better for our species. This also increases the value of psychology as a subject because of the impact it makes on the world. This view links with the utilitarian principle of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ – in other words, it is considered acceptable to harm a number of people as long as the number of people who will benefit is larger. On the other hand, others may feel that in fact harming anyone – no matter what the benefit – is morally wrong.