Following my previous post on the ethics of conducting research on the internet I thought a nice follow up would be The Helsinki Convention and the 5 basic ethical principles.. This is a set of basic ethical principles regarding human experimentation.There has been six revisions of the principles since 1975 with the last one done in 2008.
The basic principles are:
- Beneficence and Nonmaleficence- this principle states that researchers and psychologists must take care with the people they work with and make sure they come to no harm.
- Fidelity and Responsibility- this principles states that the psychology may strike to establish a relationship of trust with the participants they work with.
- Integrity- This principle state that the psychologist should promote accuracy, honesty and truthfulness in the science, teaching and practice of psychology.
- Justice- This principle states that the psychologist must recognizes that fairness and justice entitle all persons to access to and benefit from the contributions of psychology. Psychologists exercise reasonable judgment and take precautions to ensure that their potential biases, the boundaries of their competence, and the limitations of their expertise do not lead to or condone unjust practices.
- Respect for People’s Rights and Dignity- This principle states that the psychologist should respect the dignity and worth of all people and the rights of the individual’s privacy, confidentiality and self-determination. Psychologists should also be aware that special safeguards may be necessary to protect the rights and welfare of persons or communities whose vulnerabilities impair autonomous decision making.
I think that these principles are obviously a good thing for psychologists to follow, i also agree that they are revised regularly to keep them up to date with the way in which the world in changing. Especially with the the increasing speed of change of technology.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this last post, nothing to heavy to read!
Merry Christmas 🙂
statstastic 
Right now it’s all about deception.
Really good summary of the Helsinki Convention and a great amount of information is presented. But I disagree that they are totally a good thing, I don’t think that Psychologists need to protect participants as much as the Helsinki Convention says we do. The idea of informed consent lies heavily in the Helsinki Convention and I think personally it was a short sighted mistake to make.
Informed consent shuns the idea of deception in research and would have Psychologists offering the hypothesis of the study before allowing the participant to sign up. This can massively affect the results of the study due to Demand Characteristics, where the participant tries much harder to achieve the expected results of an experiment because they have been able to work out the actual response the experimenter is measuring. The problems have been outlined for one particular study here – (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/demand-characteristics-problem.html). We at this time have no idea how many studies have been affected by Demand Characteristics and until we loosen the demands of informed consent then I don’t believe we can have truly valid data.
hey good blog this week! you have given a good insight into the five basic ethical principals. but i dont think that following these five principals are totally benficial for researchers. Deception is how we get the most relevent and important research, and to follow these five principals make this very difficult.
good blog 🙂
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You summarized the principles well and clearly although you could have gone into more details about why the are important to follow; for example intergrity- what would happen if the psychologist did lie? The participants could come to harm or may not take part in experiments again, psychologists also do not want a stereotype that psychologists lie or that psychology experiments are not worth taking part in, we need participants and it also ties into the ideas of responsibility and trust, no one is going to trust an experimenter who lies to them constantly and this could mean they only half heartedly take part giving them a result which is not true to how the would normally behave. There are further issues with deception though; if we do tell participants every part of the study it could also cause them to behave different; also is it fair to the participant? Should psychologists really express things like ‘we are studying whether attractive people are cleverer than unattractive people and we’ve put you in the group of unattractive people’ or should this information not be told to the participant, technically not telling them is deceit but telling them is potentially causing them mental harm as well as being irresponsible and not protecting the participants dignity. There are issues like this when the principles may go against each other.
I’m not sure I agree with your last statement “these principles are obviously a good thing for psychologists”, as for how I see it, the ethical principles are merely some guidelines, but in certain occasions it’s up to the researchers whether to follow them or not. The main problem I see with it is, how all the others have already pointed out, deception. Social psychologists use it sometime, whilst experimental economists tend not to. Interestingly up to 81% of published studies from the best psychological journals have used deception (Adair, Dushenko & Lindsay, 1985). In order to truly study a particular human behaviour, psychologists cannot give too much information about what they’re going to look at, but have to somehow mislead their participants, so that this way they –the subjects- won’t change their responses. http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/2011/07/21/how-much-deception-is-there-in-social-psychology/
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