Ethics are moral principles and standards of conduct that differentiate between the right and wrong of a person’s behaviour (Cardwell and Flanagan, 2005). Ethical issues are a huge concern within psychology as most psychological research is carried out on human participants. The need for a distinct and direct set of guidelines for research psychologists led to the development of the ethical principles that underlie all psychological research today. Different professional organisations of psychologists have drawn up different set of guidelines or principles. Examples are American Psychological Association (APA) and British Psychological Society (BPS) whose guidelines state that psychologists must respect the rights and dignity of each research participant when carrying out their work (Cardwell et al., 2003). This essay will cover three ethical issues within psychology to include; deception, informed consent and protection of participants.
The first ethical issue is …show more content…
Psychologists deal with ethical issues in research by following ethical guidelines created by the British Psychological Society or the American Psychological Association. For a piece of research to be of a high-quality, it must contain good ethical practice and have considered all possible ethical issues before the research is carried out. All institutions that carry out research will have ethical committees which meet to consider research projects before the commence. Where ethical problems arise, a cost-benefit analysis is often applied, where costs are the potential negative consequences of the research and the benefits are the positive consequences of the research. This provides a framework for making ethical decisions and involves subjective judgements about costs and benefits. If the benefits outweigh the costs then the research will get the go ahead from the ethical
The first ethical issue is …show more content…
Psychologists deal with ethical issues in research by following ethical guidelines created by the British Psychological Society or the American Psychological Association. For a piece of research to be of a high-quality, it must contain good ethical practice and have considered all possible ethical issues before the research is carried out. All institutions that carry out research will have ethical committees which meet to consider research projects before the commence. Where ethical problems arise, a cost-benefit analysis is often applied, where costs are the potential negative consequences of the research and the benefits are the positive consequences of the research. This provides a framework for making ethical decisions and involves subjective judgements about costs and benefits. If the benefits outweigh the costs then the research will get the go ahead from the ethical