Ethics Questions

Discussion Questions

Ethical Issues in Behavioral Research (2nd ed.)

Chapter 5

1. When one signs up for the Army, does one “sign up” for stress experiments?

2. When one signs up for Facebook, does one “sign up” for experiments by the company that produces Facebook?

3. When one signs up for a course, what kinds of experiments is the teacher entitled to do with students? Isn’t teaching a course, in a sense, often an experiment?

4. If you were about to crash and someone all of a sudden gave you a series of tasks to do, would it arouse your suspicions?

5. How do you measure ecological validity?

6. Is a kind of validity more important if it can be more precisely quantified?

7. Did Bickman essentially obtain results paralleling those of Milgram?

8. Do investigators have the right to use people on the street as research subjects without the people’s knowledge?

9. How would you define privacy?

10. Has privacy become less important today than in the past? Or is it at least perceived as less important by younger people?

11. To what extent is loss of privacy in this country for fear of terrorism an overblown fear? Shouldn’t we be more afraid of car accidents and skin cancer, both of which are more likely to kill people?

12. Is it reasonable for public figures to expect any serious level of privacy? How about anyone else?

13. Suppose, as part of an experiment, you are surreptitiously taking pictures of peoples in a park. You inadvertently catch the girlfriend of your friend making out with someone else. What should you do?

14. Was the urinal study of Middlemist a violation of people’s privacy rights? Why or why not?

15. How important is each of the following factors in determining privacy?

a. Publicness of location in which behavior under study takes place

b. Publicness of the person studied

c. Degree of anonymity provided to the person studied...