Ethics Committee Evaluations

Ethics Committee Evaluations

Ethics Committee Evaluations

Imagine you are a member of the Ethical Review Committee for a reputable university. It is the committee’s responsibility to evaluate and either approve or disapprove proposals submitted by faculty members who want to use either humans or animals for research experiments. The proposals describe the experiments, including potential benefits of the research as well as any discomfort or harm that they may cause the subjects. You must either approve the research or deny permission for the experiments. It is not your job to suggest improvements on technical aspects of the projects, such as experimental design.

Instructions

For each of the following four cases, explain why you would either approve or disapprove the proposed research experiments. Evaluate each proposal based on the four main principles of ethical research provided in this lesson. Every research experiment must follow all four principles to be considered ethical. Ethics Committee Evaluations.

Example

Proposal: Dr. Croller is studying the effects of separation anxiety on young children. To determine the reaction of 5 year olds under stress, he is planning a naturalistic observation where the subjects (a mother and her child) walk through the aisles of a supermarket. When the child is unaware, the mother will slip away and hide out of sight of the child. Graduate students will film the child’s reaction and use a tally sheet of anxious behaviors to measure the child’s level of anxiety. Dr. Croller believes that if he can prove this is an anxiety-producing event, he can use this in the future as part of an experiment to teach children self-reliance through learned survival techniques.

Response: I would definitely deny this study. This is very unethical because Dr. Croller is going to inflict great harm by tricking the children into believing their mother abandoned them, which is not an appropriate use of deception. Likewise, the information learned in the study does not validate the harm caused by the professor’s methods.

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Case 1

The Psychology Department is requesting permission from your committee to use 10 rats per semester for demonstrations in a physiological psychology class. The students will work in groups of three: each group will be given a rat.

The students will first perform surgery on the rats. Each animal with be anesthetized. Following standard surgical procedures, an incision will be made in the scalp and two holes drilled in the animal’s skull. Electrodes will be lowered into the brain to create lesions on each side. The animals will then be allowed to recover.

Several weeks later, the effects of destroying this part of the animal’s brain will be tested in a shuttle avoidance task in which animals will learn when to cross over an electrified grid. The instructor admits the procedure is a common demonstration and that no new information will be gained from the experiment. She argues, however, that students taking a course in psychology must have the opportunity to engage in small animal surgery to see firsthand the effects of brain legions.