Problems Adhering to Ethical Guidelines
- Consent - If Participants fully understand the researcher’s objectives this could change their behaviour. This is known as conforming to demand characteristics. Demand characteristics are aspects of research that give away the researcher’s expectations. This is most likely to lead to participants trying to please experimenters by giving them the results that they are looking for, thus results lack validity.
- Protection and Deception - Avoiding protection and deception limits Psychological research. Milgram would have found it very difficult to research the extent to which participants would obey an authority figure without deception and without subjecting Participants to any level of discomfort.
- Debriefing- Sometimes this is not possible when research is carried out on a large number of people in a public setting. Piliavin’s study on helping behaviour used the public on the New York Subway who were unaware that they were in an experiment and whom moved on after the experiment took place.
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