Ethics Scenario A psychology lecturer is interested in the limits of conformity,

Question

Ethics Scenario

A psychology lecturer is interested in the limits of conformity, obedience and the bystander effect. The lecturer hypotheses that people will be willing to contribute to discrimination if the environment is enjoyable and that they they will tolerate it if they are criticised for being to serious if they try to oppose it.

In his PSY 101 course he runs an experiment across a whole semester and records the results over time. He hires 10 confederates in his group of 50 to laugh whenever he makes a joke about people’s appearance in the class. He focuses on criticising people who have a “non traditional” appearance including girls wearing “masculine” clothing, people with dark eye makeup, boys with long hair, girls with short hair, students wearing indigenous clothing, moko or Maori tattoos etc.

A lecture assistant kept a tally of the incidents and records the responses of students. This includes the number of students who also laugh, whether anyone questions the teacher’s style of humour, if other students also make the same type of jokes, if students change their appearance to be more “traditional”, or whether students drop out of the course etc.

In the case that students criticise the lecturer’s behaviour the ten confederates have been told to laugh it off and encourage people to “relax” and “don’t make it a big deal”, it’s “just a bit of fun”

During the first week there were three incidents of students questioning the teachers jokes but these were short lived.

By the end of the term three students had dropped out of the course because of the jokes. These three students were debriefed about the experiment but refused to come back to the class. Five students had made significant changes to their appearance when in class. There were 20 incidents of non confederates making jokes about others appearance and the number of non confederates laughing at the jokes increased from two the first day to an average of 15 per joke by the end of the semester. The number of jokes increased from two per lecture at the beginning to 5 per lecture during the last week.

The lecturer surveyed the students about their experiences and reasons afterward and found that most of those who had laughed did so “because it was funny”, most who conformed to the style of appearance were “afraid of being the center of attention”, those who made jokes about others appearance said they enjoyed the freedom available to them in the class and so made the most of it. Those who questioned the lecturer at the start said they stopped initially because they did not want to be seen as too serious and enjoyed the content so wanted to stay.

The lecturer did not publish his findings and never intended to. He did not share the findings with the class and did not ask for any consent before conducting the study. At the end of the research his lecture assistant (that kept the records) asked him how he felt about the class; he replied that it was his favourite lecture to go to each day.

The lecturer repeated the process with his cohort in the next semester but with no hired confederates. Within the first week he had to stop the experiment as large numbers of students protested his behaviour, walked out of the theatre and made complaints to the university.

After this second attempt to conduct the study the lecturer decided that he should publish the results of the study. He thought there were important lessons for people to learn about conformity from his research. He kept personal information out of his published text and even donated money earned from the text to the Human Rights Commission to avoid being accused of publishing out of self interest.

Explanation / Answer

In this scenario, several ethical violations have taken place, ranging from not obtaining informed consent to causing psychological harm to the research participants. It is important to uphold ethical principles not only for moral reasons, but also practical ones. A failure to meet such basic principles may lead to the research being highly criticised and/or rejected by the supervisor or Ethics Committee, costing the researcher valuable time and money.

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