LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- Describe the history of ethics codes for scientific research with human participants.
- Summarize the American Psychological Association Ethics Code—especially as it relates to informed consent, deception, debriefing, research with nonhuman animals, and scholarly integrity.
The general moral principles of weighing risks against benefits, acting with integrity, seeking justice, and respecting people’s rights and dignity provide a useful starting point for thinking about the ethics of psychological research because essentially everyone agrees on them. As we have seen, however, even people who agree on these general principles can disagree about specific ethical issues that arise in the course of conducting research. This is why there also exist more detailed and enforceable ethics codes that provide guidance on important issues that arise frequently. In this section, we begin with a brief historical overview of such ethics codes and then look closely at the one that is most relevant to psychological research—that of the American Psychological Association (APA).
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