Minority Influence Forum Task

Moodle Forum Settings

Forum name: the ethical committee

Forum type: standard forum for general use

Other: no discussions but replies are allowed

Set up a forum with the above settings.  Create four new discussion posts as follows:

Learning and phobias

Watson & Rayner want to investigate the origins of phobias (irrational fears that affect a person's ability to do everyday things).  They suspect that phobias are learned early in life through a process called conditioning.  To test this idea out they are going to borrow a young boy from a nursery where they work and teach him to be afraid of rats.  They will do this by putting a rat in front of him, and when he reaches for it, banging two bits of metal together behind his head to make a loud noise.  They suspect that if they do this a few times he will learn to associate the rat with the noise and become scared of the rat.

Personal space and anxiety

Middlemist and colleagues are interested in the relationship between personal space and anxiety.  They have designed an investigation to be conducted in a men's toilet.  They will wait until a man visits one of the urinals and then send in a confederate to pretend to use the one next to him or another one further away.  They have positioned a hidden camera so they can time how long it takes the participant to start urinating (it takes longer when a person is anxious).  They suspect that the times will be significantly longer when the confederate invades the participant's personal space by standing next to him.

Learning and aggression

Bandura and his colleagues what to investigate whether children are capable of learning aggressive behaviours from the people around them.  They intend to show three year-old children from a local nursery a video of an adult acting aggressively towards an inflatable toy doll.  They will then put the children in a room with a similar doll and unobtrusively observe what they do.  They suspect that the children will imitate the things they saw the adult do.

Helping in emergencies

Piliavin and his colleagues are interested in working out which factors influence people to help in an emergency situation.  They want to carry out a field experiment on a train.  They have recruited an actor, who will pretend to collapse unconscious to the floor.  They will do this a number of times, and vary the appearance of the actor.  Sometimes he will be smartly dressed, sometimes he will be shabbily dressed and smelling of alcohol and other times he will have (fake) blood pouring out of his mouth.  The researchers intend to measure how often he gets helped and how long it takes for anyone to help him.

Task description for students:

The Ethical Committee

Recently, we have been looking at the ethical issues raised by Psychological research into social influence. We have looked at the ethical problems associated with research by psychologists like Stanley Milgram, Phil Zimbardo and Solomon Asch but also at how ethical criticisms levelled at such research can be mitigated by considering other factors like the value of the knowledge obtained from the study or the views of the participants involved. 

One of the ways that psychologists try to avoid ethical problems these days is by using ethical committees. When a psychologist wants to carry out a new piece of research they submit their proposal to an ethical committee for consideration. The committee can either: 
•	Allow the proposal through unchanged; 
•	Suggest changes to the research to make it acceptable; 
•	Disallow the research completely. 

In this forum, you get to be the ethics committee. There are descriptions of a number of research studies. Your job is to comment on whether you think they are ethically acceptable. You should highlight any features that you think raise ethical issues. Each comment should be posted as a reply to the relevant thread on the forum. 

Because ethics is a debate, not a matter of fact, you are likely to disagree about the studies. You can reply to the comments posted by other group members putting forward alternative points of view. Between you, you need to try and reach a consensus about the studies. Just like a real ethics committee, you can allow the research as it is, suggest changes or disallow it completely. 

The Rules

You can post as many comments and replies as you like, but everyone must post something about at least two of the studies. 

Ethical debates can get heated. That is fine, but keep to the subject and don't let it get personal. 

You will each be given a copy of some guidelines to help you make ethical decisions.  You can refer to these if you wish but remember that they are guidelines, not hard and fast laws.