HW 1 PS

© Park University SO308 – Assignment 1 – Page 1 7/15/2011

Week 1 Assignment – “Research Ethics”

Learning Outcomes

9. Apply the principles of ethical research.

Directions

Assignment 1 – “Research Ethics” exercise (20 points or 2% of your overall grade, due Sunday at
midnight CST of Week 1).

For this assignment, select either the “Milgram experiment of obedience to authority” or the “Stanford
Prison Experiment.” Both are classic studies in social psychology that have long raised uncomfortable
ethical debates about the limits of responsible social research. You might begin here for brief overviews
(but do not limit yourself — there are many excellent references to draw from, on the web or in print):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

A summarize what you feel to be the important points of the selected project

B identify at least three accepted modern standards of social research

C explain whether it does or does not live up to these three standards

D if it does not live up to a standard, explain what could be done to fix the problem or to prevent the
problem in other situations

E Post a synopsis of your paper in the “Reflections” discussion thread and respond to at least 2
other student postings

Submitting the Assignment and Due Date
Submit your project to the Dropbox by Sunday midnight CST of Week 1.

Format

General Format (this applies to all assignments in this course!)

o Please include a cover page with your name on it.
o Format the paper using a 12 point font and double spaced.
o The format and appearance should be professional and will be included as a portion of your

grade. Use any report format you desire, all I ask is that the document looks and reads at a
professional and/or college level of work.

o You should provide a reference to any citation used in your work using APA format.

© Park University SO308 – Assignment 1 – Page 2 7/15/2011

Grading Criteria

This assignment is worth 20 points.

Requirements: Points

Covered the topic and project requirements thoroughly:

A – summarize what you feel to be the important points of the
selected project

3

B – identify at least three accepted modern standards of social
research

4

C – explain whether it does or does not live up to these three
standards

4

D – if it does not live up to a standard, explain what could be done
to fix the problem or to prevent the problem in other situations

4

E – Post a synopsis of your paper in the “Reflections” discussion
thread and respond to at least 2 other student postings

3

Format – including web site citations, etc. 2

Total 20

Questions and Issues:

If you have any questions or issues, please post them to the Q & A discussion thread.

SOCIAL RESEARCH page 1 of 5 Ethics Decision Exercise

Following are 16 hypothetical vignettes describing research situations that may or may not involve questionable ethics:

a. A college teacher asks students in an introductory class to voluntarily complete questionnaires that the instructor will
analyze and use in preparing a journal article for publication.

b. After a field study of deviant behavior, law enforcement officials demand that a researcher identify people who
committed crimes. Rather than risk arrest as an accomplice after the fact, the researcher complies.

c. After completing the final draft of a book reporting a research project, the author discovers that hired data collectors
had falsified 30 of 3,000 surveys but chooses to ignore that fact and publish the book anyway.

d. A Ph.D. candidate studying union organization gains access to a Teamsters local as a participant-observer by telling
management that he only has a couple of years of college and has decided that he prefers a career as an over the road
trucker to being “stuck behind a desk” for the rest of his life. He has experience in the job, but is, in fact, collecting
dissertation data.

e. A college instructor wants to test the effect of unfair criticism on exam performance. She administers an exam to two
sections of the same class. The overall performance of the two sections is essentially the same. The grades of one
section are artificially lowered and the instructor berates the students for poor performance. She then administers
the same final exam to both sections and discovers that the performance of the unfairly criticized section is worse.
The hypothesis is confirmed and the results are published.

f. In a study of sexual behavior, the investigator wants to overcome participants’ reluctance to report what they might
regard as deviant behavior. To get past their reluctance, participants are asked, “Since everyone masturbates now and
then, about how often do you?”

g. A researcher incidentally discovers that 75 percent of students at a school regularly smoke marijuana. Publication of
this finding will probably create a furor in the community. Because no extensive analysis of drug use was planned as
part of the initial study, the researcher decides to ignore the finding and keep it quiet.

h. To test the extent to which people may try to save face by expressing attitudes on matters about which they are
completely ignorant, a researcher asks for their attitudes regarding fictitious issues as if they were real. (i.e., “How do
you feel about the recent political turmoil in Pagwanadonastan?”)

i. A research questionnaire is circulated to incoming first-year students as part of their university registration packet.
Although students are not told they must complete the questionnaire, the researcher hopes that they will believe they
must and generate a higher response rate.

j. A researcher promises participants a summary of the results and analysis. But due to budget cuts and a lack of
support personnel, the summary is never sent out.

k. A professor rewrites a thesis of one of his graduate students into an article and lists himself as the sole author.
l. A committee of social scientists is lobbying for Congressional approval of a National Data Service that would combine

all individual data from many separate files into one master file.
m. A graduate student joins an Internet discussion group about her favorite hobby. She occasionally posts some

responses on the board and attends “real world” events sponsored by the board and mingles with other participants.
Later, she decides to do a sociological study about their developing sense of community. She uses archived discussion
posts and notes she kept while at these events for her study.

n. A professor realizes that she personally disapproves of the ethical choices demonstrated by her participants. Even
though this may bias her interpretation of the data, she writes up her report as if she is “objective” and does not
publicly acknowledge her personal misgivings.

o. A researcher is conducting a lab experiment that tests volunteer participant abilities to stand by their own beliefs even
in the face of intense group pressures to the contrary. He believes that if they knew what he was actually studying, it
might affect the experimental outcomes, so he tells them a cover story and only reveals the true purpose of the study
after the fact.

p. A researcher receives corporate funding for an evaluation study. She conducts a thorough and fair test, and the results
are favorable to that company’s interests. The researcher does not disclose her funding source in the published study
because she fears that others may think she is biased and discount her findings.

SOCIAL RESEARCH page 2 of 5 Ethics Decision Exercise

Following are 16 actual case studies describing research on human subjects that may or may not involve questionable ethics:

1 The Tea-Room Trade (Humphreys 1975)
Humphreys took a participant-observer role as “watch queen” in order to study anonymous male homosexual activities in
St. Louis’s Forest Park public restrooms. He followed the “Johns” to their cars and recorded their license numbers.
Humphreys then posed as a market researcher to obtain their addresses from police registers. About a year later, he
disguised himself and gained entry to their homes by pretending to do a health survey — including questions about sexual
activity. Participants were never informed of their participation in a study or given the opportunity to withdraw.

2 ‘The Milgram Experiment’: obedience to authority (Milgram 1963, 1965, 1974, and others)
Male subjects, ranged from 20 to 50 in age and from a variety of professions and backgrounds, were told they had
volunteered for a study of memory and learning. On arrival, they were told by the “experimenter” (played by a 31-year-old
high school teacher) the study was of the effects of punishment on learning and “randomly” drawn to play either the
“teacher” (true subject) or “learner” (confederate played by 47-year old accountant) roles. The learner, in a separate
room, supposedly gave responses to a word-association task and the teacher was to punish him when he made mistakes.
The learner was supposedly wired to receive shocks from generator consisting of 30 levers at 15v increments (to 450 volts)
— 65% of the participants displayed total obedience in the basic experiment.

3 Zimbardo’s replication of the ‘Milgram experiment’ (Zimbardo 1969)
Similar to the Milgram experiment, Zimbardo asked all female groups to give 20 electric shocks to another woman. Two
experimental manipulations were used. Under one manipulation the “teachers” were anonymous — wearing hoods,
oversized lab coats and not using their names — while other groups had no such anonymity. Under the other, “teachers”
were played a taped “interview” of the woman they were supposed to shock just before the experiment. The interview
was constructed to make the woman seem attractive (nice, accepting, altruistic, sweet) or unattractive (obnoxious, self-
centered, conceited, and critical). Groups were seated in a darkened room and watched the victim through a one-way
mirror. Each subject was required to depress a switch on signal and the experimenter emphasized the group’s collective
responsibility. Every time the switches were depressed, the target would jump from the pain of the electric shock. And,
after the tenth trial, the victim would twitch so violently that she broke free of the restraints. Then she was restrapped
and the rest of the shocks would be administered. The entire process was repeated with the other victim (attractive or
unattractive). Interestingly, anonymity had no effect on the number of shocks given (mean = 17 of 20), but unidentifiable
subjects held their switches down for approximately twice as long (.90 sec. vs. .47 sec.). Furthermore, anonymous
subjects were unaffected by the perceived characteristics of the victim, but identifiable subjects tended to give shorter
shocks each time to the “nice” victim.

4 Tuskegee Syphilis Studies (various authors, 1930s – 1970s)
In 1932, the US Public Health Service began a longitudinal study that came to be called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated
Syphilis in the Negro Male.” Black men in Macon County, Alabama were recruited by circulating word in the community
that they could receive free tests for “bad blood” at the teaching hospital of the Tuskegee Institute. 616 men (412
diagnosed with syphilis and 204 disease-free controls) eventually participated. At the start of the study, syphilis was
poorly understood and untreatable, but penicillin became widely available as an effective cure for the disease in 1943.
Nevertheless, participants were not informed of their disease, not treated, and actively encouraged not to go elsewhere
once viable treatments were known. The medical community was aware of the study through numerous scholarly
publications, but no one formally objected to the study until 1965. The PHS convened an ethical review panel in 1969
that found no ethical violations and recommended the study continue. It was not halted until 1972, when an Associated
Press expose appeared, causing widespread public furor.

5 The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994)
The authors argue that cognitive ability is largely inherited, and that there are meaningful differences in intelligence
between culturally recognized racial and ethnic groups. They assert that cognitive ability is now the strongest force
stratifying educational and occupational access and performance, as well as mating decisions. In blunt terms, smarter
people tend to get more and better education, get better jobs and more promotions, and marry other smarter people —
thus transferring greater cognitive stratification into the next generation — and those smarter people tend to
overwhelmingly be white or Asian. In their minds, this explains continuing racial differences in life chances, particularly
between white and black Americans. As a consequence they argue that social, educational, and other ameliorative
programs cannot overcome these advantages and are effectively a waste of public funding and effort. Their findings are
almost universally discredited by other researchers due to methodological flaws, and yet their book significantly
contributed to the public perception that “race” is a real biological category and that those “races” are irrevocably
unequal.

SOCIAL RESEARCH page 3 of 5 Ethics Decision Exercise

6 ‘Zimbardo Prison Experiment’ (Zimbardo 1972, 1973; Zimbardo, et. al. 1973, 1974)
Male students, testing psychologically “normal,” were divided randomly into “prisoners” and “guards.” Prisoners were
given plain uniforms, numbers, and had all personal effects removed. Guards were given military-style uniforms,
nightsticks, and mirrored sunglasses. Prisoners were incarcerated in cells and had to maintain their roles around the clock.
Guards were given eight-hour shifts and told simply to maintain a “reasonable degree of order” without inflicting physical
harm. The prisoners soon began antagonizing the guards and the guards rapidly resorted to mental and physical abuse to
maintain order among the prisoners. Though the experiment was scheduled for two weeks, conditions became so
dangerous that it was called on the sixth day.

7 Middletown studies (Lynd and Lynd 1929, 1937; Vidich and Bensman 1968; Vidich 1999; and others)
Though the Lynds promised confidentiality and followed the standard convention of changing names and locations, it soon
became common knowledge that “Middletown” was Muncie, IN. Once that was known, it was also easy to recognize
individuals in what was then a community of only twenty thousand. Of course, many of those portrayals were unflattering
and related private information, causing some participants to feel as if they had been betrayed.

8 Project Camelot (Horowitz 1965)
Study sponsored by the CIA, ostensibly to test W. I. Thomas’ idea of the “self-fulfilling prophecy”. A research team from
several prestigious American universities was assembled that gained access to several remote South American villages, but
failed to disclose their funding source or true purpose. They were actually attempting to locate hotbeds of potential
revolutionary activity in different villages by identifying groups of peasants who identified certain future political scenarios
as very likely and desirable — thus identifying those willing to participate in potential government insurrections. An
anthropologist accidentally spilled the beans over dinner with a university official in South America and the project was
unmasked and forced to an early end.

9 Pygmalion in the Classroom (Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968)
In the mid-1960s the researchers approached administrators at a working class elementary school. They explained that
they had developed a test (which they called the “Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition”) that would not only measure IQ,
but also identify which students were about to experience rapid intellectual development. The school agreed to have their
students tested at the beginning of the academic year and the researchers, in turn, gave administrators and teachers two
lists: one of students that would continue performing at their previous levels, and another of students they could expect to
make remarkable progress in the coming academic year (no matter what their previous performance). In actuality, there
was no such test and the researchers had randomly assigned the students to each condition. They further instructed the
teachers not to treat their students differently, since this progress would occur naturally. At the end of the academic year,
the test was re-administered. Students in the control condition evidenced a mean 8-point IQ score gain, while those in
the experimental condition averaged a more than 20-point increase.

10 Yanomami: The Fierce People (Chagnon 1968, & others) – critiqued in Darkness in El Dorado (Tierney 2002)
Beginning in 1964, a South American tribe called the Yanomamo became the subject of intense and prolonged research
scrutiny. They were regarded as perhaps the last truly “primitive” people — and the most violent. Chagnon and Neel’s
research was world famous and considered groundbreaking at the time, but has subsequently raised a host of ethical
issues. Among the charges (still being vigorously disputed) were that much of the evidence was staged, researchers
interfered to incite war and other conflicts with the Yanomamo, and that (either through improper procedures or ill-
conceived medical experiments) they introduced a number of often fatal diseases into the population. This research also
opened the door for the US government to use the Yanomamo as test subjects for Project Sunshine (to test the effects of
radiation poisoning) and other medical and social experiments conducted by a variety of agencies, companies, and
research teams that have subsequently decimated the tribe.

11 Effect of Blood on Reaction to a Victim (Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972)
In the Spring of 1964, Kitty Genovese was brutally murdered outside her apartment building in Queens, NYC while 38
onlookers did nothing. In the wake of that incident, Darley and Latane (1968) proposed their theory of “diffusion of
responsibility” (or the “bystander effect”), which asserts that a crowd of onlookers are less likely to offer aid to a victim
because they feel someone else will get involved. Piliavin and Piliavin thought that there was another factor at work: the
perception of risk due to involvement. To test their hypothesis, they conducted a field experiment in the New York
subway system. A confederate, dressed as a blind man with dark glasses and a white cane, faked a fainting spell on a
moving subway car between stops while researchers recorded bystander reactions. They conducted the experiment 42
times under two conditions: one where the “victim” simply collapsed, and the other where they also appeared to bleed
about the mouth. They repeatedly got into trouble with subway officials, ran the risk of a passenger pulling the emergency
stop cord, and induced panic among some riders during several of the “blood” trials.

SOCIAL RESEARCH page 4 of 5 Ethics Decision Exercise

12 NIMH Treatment of Depression Collaborative Research Program (Elkin, et al. 1989)
Participants with diagnosed major depressive disorders were recruited from several outpatient facilities and placed in one
of four experimental conditions lasting 16 weeks: drug therapy (with a medicine clinically demonstrated to mitigate
depressive symptoms), interpersonal psychotherapy (weekly sessions concerning how to improve their relations with
others), cognitive therapy (weekly sessions to help them understand and correct their negatively distorted self images),
and a placebo (an inert pill that had no effects either way on depression). 180 patients completed the trial. Results found
the most benefits from drug therapy, with interpersonal therapy a relatively close second, and smaller benefits for cognitive
therapy — although neither psychotherapeutic program had significant effects on the most severe cases.

13 Studies of Independence and Conformity (Asch 1956)
Participants were told that they would participate in an experiment in visual judgment and were the last ones shown into
a lab room in which a number of presumed participants were already seated (they were actually confederates). In each
trial, the group was presented with a standard line and three comparison lines, and then asked to individually identify
which matched by calling out their answers in turn. On the first two trials, all went as expected, and everyone answered
correctly. But beginning on the third trial, the confederates just as confidently and unanimously gave a clearly incorrect
response. When it came to the real participant’s turn, he was faced with a dilemma: answer correctly or affirm the
obviously wrong conclusion of the group. 75% of the participants went against their own judgments and publicly agreed
with the group’s wrong answer on at least one occasion. The experiment caused confusion, self-doubt, or a desire to
conform in most of the participants, but they were fully debriefed as to the study’s true nature at its conclusion.

14 The Mountain People (Turnbull 1974)
Study of a northern Ugandan tribe, the Ik, which in contrast to his previous research, Turnbull asserted were a “group of
human beings totally lacking in any ethical code.” The Ik were traditionally nomadic hunters and gatherers, but the
government had recently transformed their hunting grounds into a national park and forced them into a sedentary life as
farmers in an arid mountain region. Prolonged drought and famine made their predicament desperate. And to complicate
things further, corrupt government officials regularly redirected food rations supplied by outside aid organizations.
Turnbull remained an ostensibly detached and uninvolved observer, but imposed his own ethical code on his write-up,
presenting what many consider a biased and insufficiently substantiated account (thought it won awards at the time).

15 The Robbers Cave Experiment (Sherif, et al. 1961)
In the summer of 1954, two sets of 11-year-old boys were bused from Oklahoma City to a camp in the San Bois
Mountains. The boys had been pre-selected through an intensive, multi-method process as normal, well-adjusted, having
similar educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, and no “unusual” personal histories. The parents knew about and
consented to the experiment, but the boys only thought they were heading for a typical summer camp experience. The
boys were randomly selected into two groups, brought separately to the camp, and segregated from one another for the
first week. They were involved in camp activities that built group cohesion, and each group chose a name (Eagles and
Rattlers), began sporting their name on clothing and emblems, and developed their own group rituals. By the end of the
first week, the groups discovered one another, began berating the others, and asked to engage in competition. Those
competitive activities had already been planned as part of the experiment. In the next week, they were pitted against one
another in a series of contests for prizes, and what started as name calling escalated into open hostility: commando raids
on the other group’s cabin, humiliating pranks, vandalism, and isolated fistfights. The Eagles and Rattlers were facing off
for armed combat with rocks, clubs, and knives, when that phase of the experiment was halted. Over the next two weeks,
the researchers involved the two groups in a series of shared challenges that reversed their bitter enmity and the boys left
the Robber’s Cave experiment with strongly developed cross-group bonds.

16 Murray Center experiments (Murray and others 1940s – 1960s) – accounted in Chase (2003, 2004)
Henry Murray was a social psychologist working for the OSS during World War II on psychological testing and
brainwashing. After the war, he continued these experiments at Harvard. In the last of these experiments, begun in the
late 1950s, Murray’s team convinced (some say coerced) about 80 Harvard Freshmen to commit to a three-year series of
studies. Participants spent about two hors a week in the lab and were also asked to produce hundreds of pages sharing
the most intimate details of their lives. During the first year, they were subjected to an exhaustive battery of psychological
tests. But in the second, they were asked to write a position paper justifying their life philosophy and told that they would
then discuss their philosophy with another student — an aspiring lawyer. The participants were ushered into a lab room
with a one-way mirror, movie camera, and bright lights trained on their chair. They were affixed with electrodes
monitoring biomedical data. And then, instead of a discussion with another undergraduate, they were immediately and
relentlessly attacked by a well-trained law student with directions to reduce them to incoherence. This was repeated each
week. In the third year, they were also made available for a wide range of additional (and often stressful) experiments.

SOCIAL RESEARCH page 5 of 5 Ethics Decision Exercise

For each set of examples, do the following:
1. Rank these examples in terms of how seriously they violate the principles of ethical research on human subjects.
2. Place each example in one of the following four groups: (“severe ethical violations,” “moderate ethical violations,”

“minor ethical violations,” or “no ethical violations”) by drawing horizontal lines through the list to demarcate your
groups. Label each group.

3. For each of the above issues, identify what you believe to be the one or two ethical principles (if any) that are most
apparently violated in that example. To the right of each blank insert the initial corresponding to the major
principle(s) violated in that study.
H Harm Principle: participants should exit the study no worse off than when they entered.
C Consent Principle: participants should sufficiently understand and consent to the research before the data is analyzed

or disseminated, and that data should only be used or shared in ways consistent with participants’ permission.
F Fairness Principle: researchers should take every precaution to honestly and accurately represent their data through

all stages of the research cycle and acknowledge any known biases or other commitments that may have inadvertently
affected any stage of the research process.

P Protection Principle: researchers should take reasonable precautions to safeguard their data, present their results in
a responsible manner that minimizes misinterpretation, and continue to uphold their commitments to participants and
the groups they represent after the research is completed.

E Exchange Principle: researchers and participants (including, where appropriate, guardians and organizations) should
negotiate, agree to, and maintain a clear set of reciprocal rights and responsibilities toward one another.

A Attribution Principle: researchers should only take credit for their own work, meticulously document everyone’s
contributions, and assume responsibility for their mistakes and the ensuing consequences.

Hypothetical Vignettes Actual Case Studies
Most Questionable __________ Most Questionable __________

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Least Questionable __________ Least Questionable __________
On the back of this sheet, briefly explain the reasoning behind your rankings. Which principles or values did you find most
important for your decisions?