Research Methods - Chapter 4

When did people find out about the Tuskegee study? (2)

▪ In 1972, (*30 years* after a treatment for syphilis was found) the story became known to the public. ▪ The study was ended shortly thereafter. ******************************** ▪ This study was government funded! ▪ having a reason to do a study is NOT A SUFFICIENT reason to do it!

Problems with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study

▪ Subjects lied to, not treated with respect ▪ NO informed consent ▪ subjects were harmed ▪ omission & comission ▪ coerced a disadvantaged group ▪ caused long term distrust b/c this study was funded by the US federal government --> minorities were afraid to go to the doctor! ▪ The one bad thing this study *didn't* do ... they did NOT give people syphilis - studied people who had already contracted the disease

MILGRAM - observations (5)

▪ The experience was *clearly very stressful*, and there were *no attempts to reduce the stress* in later replications. - (However, participants were debriefed and some were interviewed by a psychiatrist at a later time). ▪ He did 17 replication studies --> one of the big things he was looking at was when & why did people reject ▪ it was well done research wise ▪ "I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe, and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: 'Oh God, let's stop it.' And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end" (Milgram, 1963, p. 377).

IRBs (7)

▪ Think of IRBs as "Ethical Review Boards" - Act as a check on researcher enthusiasm & advocate for participants. - The IRB is directly valuable, but it is also a legal necessity for universities receiving government funding. ▪ Composition: At least five members: Scientist Academic non-science Non-affiliated ▪ every institution has it's own review board, they can all kind of be a little different but generally function the same ********************************************** ▪ generally function the same why might have slightly different levels on the content ▪ the IRB has to look at the research BEFORE you conduct your research and see if it looks ethically appropriate ▪ non affiliated - people in the community near the research ▪ might be the people who will be at cost and benefits ▪ "who watches the watchers" component ▪ trying to get a view from a non-scientific perspective

Certificate of Informed Consent (6)

▪ Title of the study ▪ Investigators ▪ risks and benefits ▪ age ▪ who to contact ▪ participation info

General IRB Procedures (7)

▪ Training - Researchers and research assistants must demonstrate knowledge of the ethical guidelines that govern their work. ▪ Application - Researchers exhaustively describe their proposed studies, including methods, rationale, risks, benefits, etc. ▪ Review - The board identifies any changes that are appropriate or necessary to minimize risks, etc. ▪ Approval - The board approves a final version of the study design. ▪ Continuing Review - Researchers seek annual permission to continue the study, report any unanticipated events, etc. ************** ▪ A lot of IRBs don't go through a full process ▪ a lot of them get an *expedited review*.... when we think there will be almost NO harm ▪ over the years IRBs have gotten more and more involved in the research domain

BELMONT: respect for persons (8)

▪ Treat people as *autonomous agents*. People are free to make up their own minds concerning participation (or nonparticipation) in research ▪ Informed Consent ▪ No coercion or undue influence (extreme incentives) ▪ Culture and local circumstances should be considered ▪ Protection of *vulnerable* populations - Children - Prisoners - Non autonomous ************************************** ▪ not a lot of people did obedience research after the Milgram experiment ▪ Informed consent ▪ you can leave any time ▪ avoid coercion ▪ don't have to answer questions you don't want to

the TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS STUDY (5)

▪ U.S. Public Health Service and the Tuskegee Institute wanted to examine the effects of untreated syphilis. ▪ At the time (1932) only a dangerous treatment involving the infusion of toxic metals was available to treat syphilis - they had treatments like Malaria or injecting toxic metals - they wanted to see how the disease progressed and if there was a better way to attack it ▪ Came up with "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male"

DECEPTION (8)

▪ Withholding study details or actively lying to participants. - Withhold info (omission) - Deliberate misinformation (commission) ▪ they try to build up an environment so they can have a lot of control ▪ the milgram experiment involved it ▪ experiments with placebos - is deception in science always unethical? ▪ a lot of times you have to at least hold back some information temporarily **************************************************** ▪ Commission & Omission in Tuskegee ▪ 97-99% of the time... YES

BELMONT: beneficence (4)

▪ if it's low risk high benefit, do the study! ▪ low risk low benefit is ok ▪ high risk high benefit is the one to look out for ▪ low benefit, high risk, don't do it !

Milgram - results (4)

▪ ⅔ of the participants didn't stop until they were out of buttons to press ▪ some of the people were told to just keep shocking the "learner" at the highest voltage and they did! ▪ nobody is actually electroshocked ▪ nobody actually died in this experiment

BENEFICENCE: (3)

"Persons are treated in an ethical manner not only by respecting their decisions and protecting them from harm, but also by making efforts to secure their well-being. Such treatment falls under the principle of beneficence. The term "beneficence" is often understood to cover acts of kindness or charity that go beyond strict obligation. In this document, beneficence is understood in a stronger sense, as an obligation. Two general rules have been formulated as complementary expressions of beneficent actions in this sense: (1) do not harm and (2) maximize possible benefits and minimize possible harms." ********************************************************* ▪ the idea here is that people are meant to be treated in an ethical manner ▪ avoid harming people, look out for their well-being ▪ have to carefully consider costs and benefits

What were the MAIN problems with Milgram's study?

1. when people say they want to stop you're supposed to want them to stop ... infromed consent 2. the degree of stress/anxiety the people experienced was about as extreme as we could make a person feel ▪ Milgram argued that to do research on this topic, he needed to have that extreme stress - very informative isn't good enough ▪ in lots of psych research there is some deception ▪ a lot of research will make people feel bad but that's ok because people feel bad in everyday life ▪ the IRB emphasizes work that we think is ethically appropriate

ETHICAL DECISION MAKING

▪ Should we use animals? ▪ Should we deceive people? ▪ Do we have to deceive people for this study? ▪ Should we study children? ▪ Should we study this question at all? ▪ Should we compensate participants? ▪ How much compensation is ethical? ▪ Are the participants at risk of harm? ************************************************ ▪ should we use animals? - there have been a lot of advancements - there has been a lot of research and medical advancements made on rats ▪ milgram - are we allowed to study this question? - it's going to be informative, but how much can we do?

APA STANDARD 8 (7)

▪ Standard that specifically applies to research practices and rules. - Institutional Review Boards (IRB) - Informed consent - Deception - Debriefing - Animal research - Research misconduct **This is the one we care about for research methods

WHAT IS 'UNETHICAL'? - What are the components of an ethical experiment? - What are commonalities among unethical experiments? - Where do you draw the line? - examples (3)

▪ The Stanford Prison "Experiment" - they let one of the "prisoners" go because he seemed to be having a mental breakdown - they wanted to make him come back (a.k.a kidnapping) ▪ "Little Albert" - baby was conditioned to be afriad of fluffy white things - afraid of white fluffy things like Santa's beard for the rest of his life ▪ "Little Monsters" study - collected orphans - made speech impediment in children by yelling at a group of them and criticizing the way that they spoke

Why might a researcher want to avoid the informed consent process? (5)

▪ some researchers don't always have to use informed consent under certain conditions ▪ Why might you want to avoid it? ▪ if you think it won't affect the results AND it is a very low risk experiment ▪ when researchers show up on college campuses ▪ an experimenter would look up at the sky in the middle of campus... they want to see if they will look up at the sky or not

MILGRAM's Experiment

Participants (teachers) were instructed to give increasingly higher voltage shocks to the "learner" (actually a confederate) when a mistake was made in a learning task. ***************************************** ▪ Milgram was going to give Americans unethical orders to prove that only Germans would follow unethical orders ▪ he wanted to demonstrate that Americans wouldn't be obedient to the same unethical orders ▪ he brought in a number of participants ▪ in his initial study he was recruiting for business men, doctors, doc workers... he was looking for a number of men that were around the same age as the men from the Nuremberg trials ▪ He brought them in and had them sit next to a confederate ▪ he told them that he was doing a study on "punishment on learning" ▪ he said one of them is going to be the teacher and the other one is going to be the student - He was trying to ask if they could remember (random) word pairs - and every single time the participant is the teacher, the confederate is the learner - every time the learner gets one wrong, you flip a switch to give a higher and higher electric shock... the confederate wasn't actually getting shocked ▪ They are in separate rooms and at some point you can hear the confederate start yelling in the other room, screaming, banging on walls ▪ there's a research assistant in the room telling the participant to keep going ▪ at the point of XXX (highest voltage) they just hear a bang and a chair fall over, and the "learner" doesn't respond anymore ... it's supposed to seem like the person is dead ▪ they were expecting people to walk out when things started getting extreme

DEBRIEFING INFORMATION

The survey you have just completed is part of a larger collection of studies that are concerned with how people use new information to make decisions. Specifically, we are interested in the process of information distortion, or the tendency to distort new information to favor an initially preferred alternative (see Carlson, Meloy, & Russo, 2006). The study you have just participated in contained two conditions: a control condition and a choice condition. You were randomly assigned to the choice condition. In the related survey, you were asked to view and rate various attributes associated with two different apartments and to express your preference as you did so. The ratings you provided will be compared with the average ratings provided by respondents from a control condition. Participants in the control condition evaluated the same attribute values, but did not develop a preference for an apartment since every attribute was about an entirely new apartment (i.e., no apartment names were ever repeated). We expect that participants who have a preference for one apartment will rate new information about that apartment as more positive than participants in the control condition. Likewise, information about an apartment that is not preferred may be seen as more negative. Additionally, you answered some questions relating to memory and decision making tendencies. This information will be useful for examining how people remember information about chosen and non-chosen options and to see if individual differences in decision making tendencies are related to information distortion. Thank you for participating in this study. If you have other questions about this research, feel free to speak with _________, at The Ohio State University (Phone: _________). If you wish to read a bit more about the topic of information distortion, you might want to consult the following references: Carlson, K. A., Meloy, M. G., & Russo, J. E. (2006). Leader-driven primacy: Using attribute order to affect consumer choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 32, 513-518. Russo, J. E., Carlson, K. A., & Meloy, M. G. (2006). Choosing an inferior alternative. Psychological Science, 17, 899-904. Russo, J. E., Carlson, K. A., Meloy, M. G. & Yong, K. (2008). The goal of consistency as a cause of information distortion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137, 456-470.

JUSTICE: (2)

Who ought to receive the benefits of research and bear its burdens? This is a question of justice, in the sense of "fairness in distribution" or "what is deserved." An injustice occurs when some benefit to which a person is entitled is denied without good reason or when some burden is imposed unduly. *************************************************** ▪ you have to watch who's in your study ▪ the people who are in your study are the one's subjected to the costs of the experiment

RESEARCH MISCONDUCT (8)

▪ Data fabrication (APA 8.10) - Changing (or inventing) data to fit predictions. ▪ Data falsification (APA 8.10) - More broadly influencing the study's results in ways not specified by the hypotheses and design - e.g., deleting subjects/data, influencing subject's responses ▪ Plagiarism (APA standard 8.11) - Representing another's work as your own. - Avoid plagiarism by citing the sources that you use. ************************************************* ▪ data fabrication - data that you made up ▪ falsification - you want to test if you're treatment is working so you test 5 participants and not really working, it doesn't work like 8 times and then it suddenly works and then you stop - influencing subjects responses ▪ plagiarism - so easy to detect it's not really happening anymore

Penicillin (6)

▪ Didn't treat participants with penicillin when it was found to be an effective treatment (1943). - Offered a "generous burial fee" (Morling, 2014, p. 92) to families, allowing for an autopsy. ********************************* ▪ In 1928 people *discovered* penicillin ▪ They found out it was helpful for treating syphilis in 1943 - researchers in the study knew it would help and they said "BUT .... there could be a better, cheaper, way to treat it" ▪ the participants in the study couldn't get help because they didn't even know they had syphilis

THE BELMONT REPORT (6)

▪ From a 1976 commission that was organized to discuss basic ethical principles for research. - Response to Tuskegee, Nazi experiments, etc. ▪ It outlined three central principles for ethical research ▪ PRINCIPLE: respect for persons ▪ PRINCIPLE: beneficence ▪ PRINCIPLE: justice **************** ▪ Providing guidelines for ethical research ▪ came out in the 1970s and helped researchers think .. "do I need to electroshock?" ▪ this was really in the wake of Tuskegee

Julius Wagner-Juaregg (8)

▪ He was a psychiatrist ▪ Won a Nobel prize in medicine ▪ invented a new type of therapy called "pyrotherapy" - his hypothesis was that when you get sick your body gets hot and that's what kills the flu - he gave people the flu to "cure" them - lots of people died so... his conclusion was that he wasn't making the people *sick enough* ▪ He injected paralyzed syphilitic patients with Malaria --> they did start to get better but now they had Malaria!

What did Milgram do?

Designed study to demonstrate that Americans would *not be so obedient*: nullify Nuremberg defense.

Informed Consent

Each participant should learn about the project, procedures, risks, and benefits, and should decide independently whether to participate based on that knowledge.

Emotional Contagion - Facebook study (6)

Emotional Contagion: Decreased amount of positive/negative posts from friends people would see on their Facebook wall (N = 689,003) ▪ psychologists would go onto fb walls and start deleting stuff ▪ it would delete things and evaluate content for positivity and negativity ▪ if they take away positive content from your Facebook wall, how can it affect you? ▪ can it make people feel worse about themselves? they didn't ask if they could do that ▪ some of these people were probably depressed

Post-WWII: Nuremberg trials defense: (4)

▪ "I was following orders" ▪ *Scientific interest*: Fundamental differences in responses to authority (Germans v. rest-of-world). ************************** ▪ After WWII people were saying in their defense that they were just following orders - Why did the Germans follow such unethical orders?

RESPECT FOR PERSONS (2)

▪ "Respect for persons incorporates at least two ethical convictions: first, that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents, and second, that persons with diminished autonomy are entitled to protection. The principle of respect for persons thus divides into two separate moral requirements: *the requirement to acknowledge autonomy and the requirement to protect those with diminished autonomy*." ************************************ ▪ ^^this is some of the complete text from the respect for persons ▪ treat people as autonomous agents ▪ you're free to make up your'e own mind if you want to participant or not

GENERAL IMPORTANT RESEARCH RULES: (3)

▪ *Confidentiality*: what happens in the research study (therapy session, grades, supervision, etc.) stays in there ▪ *Privacy*: the right to decide how information about themselves is communicated to others ▪ *Freedom from coercion*: Physical, psychological, monetary ***************************************** ▪ whatever they're asking, you might not want everyone to know about it ▪ psychologists don't want any identifying info ▪ FREEDOM FROM COERCION

DEBRIEFING (4)

▪ A structured description of the research and a full disclosure of any deception involved. Required for deception studies (by APA) - Participants told the reason(s) for deception - Full disclosure of study, chance for questions ▪ *temporary* costs of deception vs. *enduring* benefits of knowledge ******************************************* ▪ they might not tell you WHY you were doing things at first, but they tell you EVERYTHING at the end ▪ who to contact, why they held back the info ▪ temporary cost of deception vs. enduring knowledge

Animal Research (5)

▪ APA Standard 8.09: *The Three R's* ▪ *Replacement* - Researchers should find an alternative to animals in research when possible. ▪ *Refinement* - Modify experimental procedures and aspects of animal handling to minimize or eliminate animal distress. ▪ *Reduction* - Adopt experimental designs that use the fewest animal subjects possible. - Humane care - As few animals as possible - Is this research important enough to justify the use of animals and the treatment they receive? - Alternatives to animals (cost-benefit)? ▪ there's still a decent amount of research done in cognitive and neuroscience ******************** ▪ The three R's ▪ outlines from the APA standard of how to treat animals ▪ if you can do it without animals don't do it ▪ minimize animal distress ▪ try to reduce the number - still use a lot of rats - behaviorists were not nice to animals

APA Ethical Principles (8)

▪ Based on the Belmont principles: further customized for psychologists ▪ Five *general* ethical principles (at right) ▪ Ten *specific* ethical standards *A. Beneficence & nonmaleficence* B. Fidelity & Responsibility C. Integrity *D. Justice* *E. Respect for People's Rights & Dignity* **************************************** ▪ APA tailored some of the features from the Belmont report in the field of psychology ▪ basically just expanded on the content of the Belmont report

MILGRAM: ethical violations ▪ What were the GOALS of the study? ▪ What were the COSTS of the study? ▪ What were the BENEFITS of the study? - There were some ethical violations associated with this experiment. - How would you classify them? - Where do you draw the line?

▪ One reason this was considered horrifying is because some people thought this was psychologically distressing ▪ Milgram ran 14 similar experiments ▪ this is a picture from one of the later one's ▪ What if you can see them , what if you have to put their hand down on a shock pad? - more people stopped earlier... separation is important ▪ What are the costs of this study? ▪ He DID debrief the participants ▪ there didn't appear to be long term damage ... wasn't statistically investigated ▪ obedience research - he said he would tell them to do something they wouldn't want to do - if someone wants to leave, you can't make them stay ... in this experiment they made the participants stay ▪ In the game of cyberball when the people throw the ball to only two people and leave you out, you get really depressed

TUSKEGEE: ethical violations What were the GOALS of the study? What were the COSTS of the study? What were the BENEFITS of the study? There were some ethical violations associated with this experiment. How would you classify them? Where do you draw the line? (10)

▪ Participants were *not treated respectfully*: ▪ Lies, lack of informed consent, ▪ career manipulation ▪ lack of information prior to and during their involvement. ▪ Participants were *harmed*, both by commission and by omission. ▪ Participants were not told about a cure and were subjected to painful and dangerous tests (e.g., a spinal tap). ▪ Researchers *targeted a disadvantaged social group* (and then treated them poorly). ▪ Family members of participants also suffered. - Caused greater distrust **************** ▪ GOAL: to look at untreated syphilis across the lifespan ▪ cost: lives ▪ benefits: ????

Who did the researchers recruit for the Tuskeegee study? What did they tell the subjects? (5)

▪ Recruited 400 black men who had syphilis ▪ Recruited 200 black men without syphilis ▪ Researchers told them they were being treated for *"bad blood,"* were not given any treatment for syphilis (intentional deception) ▪ RESTRICTION: Participants were *prevented from joining the Army*, where they would have healthcare and education benefits. ▪ They recruited poor, uneducated black men b/c they could *coerce* them into being in a study for long periods of time with money ************** ▪ They told patients they had "bad blood" NOT syphilis --> intentional deception ▪ They had *restrictions* --> couldn't join the army --> prevented from getting actual syphilis treatment

BELMONT: beneficence (5)

▪ Researchers must carefully consider potential costs and benefits ▪ *Minimize psychological harms*: may be hard to quantify ▪ Heuristic: "Would a participant encounter similar levels of stress or harm during the normal course of daily life? ▪ *Cannot withhold beneficial treatments* even if it means compromising study ▪ If, partway through a study, researchers come to the conclusion that a treatment is clearly beneficial, then it must be available to participants in the control condition as well.

BELMONT: justice (4)

▪ Researchers must fairly balance the *costs* to participants with the *benefits* to *participants and others*. ▪ Participants bear the burden of risky research, so they should be drawn from the same groups that benefit from the research. - Syphilis could affect anyone, so black men should not have been the only sample for a risky and harmful study. ▪ Key Questions: How are participants selected for the research? How well do they represent the people who will benefit from the study? *********************************************************** ▪ the benefits were meant to be universal ▪ there was a cost to the specific sample (underprivileged population) ▪ researchers generally want a sample that is representative of the population you want to apply it to