Sample Reflective Report (2)

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Reflective Report #2 Ethics in Research Submitted by Tan, Kerli Submitted to Jame Batara Department of Psychology

Objective I find fascinating the idea of social pressure and conformity, and more especially the work of Solomon Asch, who conducted groundbreaking research on the subject in 1951 and established the Asch Conformity Experiment, a seminal experiment in social psychology (Asch, 1951; 1952). A line judgment assignment had a clear response in his experiment. Since the experiment has three or four researchers posing as "confederates" to deceive the real participants into thinking they are a fellow respondent, it raises ethical questions (Fujita and Mori, 2017). It is critical that responders receive appropriate debriefing after the experiment and that researchers adhere to ethical norms, regardless of whether there is little risk of bodily or psychological injury to the participants. Reflective In the field of social psychology, the Asch experiments probed the nature of human frailty. Despite failing to obtain informed consent, misleading his victims, and inflicting severe shame or humiliation on them, Asch incurred minimal criticism for his studies in which seventy-five percent of participants behaved against their own interests. According to Fitzgerald (2005), the ugly side of human nature, rather than actual injury, is what offends. While Asch did provide a debriefing, the research showed that regular people like our peers could act in ways that most people in comfortable situations couldn't imagine, which was a major source of moral outrage—not because the participants might have been hurt, but because of this.

Instead of using Asch's original, mostly male volunteers from the 1950s, I'd prefer to view and conduct the experiment with current results with an equal number of male and female participants in the group conditions to ensure objective results. According to this benefit-to-risk ratio, the advantages of the experiment would substantially exceed its disadvantages, in contrast to Asch's initial study. All male college students from the McCartney era in the 1950s were participants in the original study (Perrin & Spencer, 1980). Just as today's kids freely criticize authority figures, American students of the 1950s were likewise unassuming citizens. The findings would be more relevant and useful to modern society if the conformity experiment were carried out during this time. Interpretative Forsyth and Pope's (1984) ethical research contrasted Asch's perception study (Asch, 1946) and conformity study (1955) to Ebbinghaus' (1913) study of memory. The research being compared in the ethics study were considered to be valid, helpful, and non-harmful by the participants. The study asked them to grade objects and make a moral judgement based on their ratings. Unfortunately, most studies fail to acknowledge the anxiety that participants had throughout Asch's conformity research, despite the fact that their discomfort about failing to conform was comparable to that of the original study (Hayes, 1995). Psychological stress, which can arise when people disagree with the majority, was essentially not protected from the participants. Back et al. (1963) discovered that individuals in the Asch circumstance had significantly elevated levels of autonomic arousal, which provides evidence that they are very emotionally invested in the event. Furthermore, this discovery

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implies that they were faced with a dilemma, unsure whether to disclose their observations or to comply to the consensus of others around them. Directly inflicting psychological distress on study participants as an integral aspect of the experiment does not align with the highest standards of ethics. Decisional Asch had to trick the student volunteers into thinking they were taking a "vision" test in order to determine if they conformed to the dominant group's views and attitudes or rebelled against them. Finding out the 'naive' participant's' reaction to the confederates' actions was the true objective. Due to participant deceit and Asch's failure to get informed permission, the study cannot be repeated in its current form, even if it did not cause any harm to participants. Modern replications of the study just need to obtain the informed consents from the experiment respondents; however, deceit was essential to produce valid results. By learning about the Asch conformity experiment's ethical considerations, I can ensure that, as a researcher, I am safeguarding the rights of human subjects. It is not sufficient to just inform participants of the study's goals and provide a debriefing; we must also safeguard their legal rights and act ethically when doing research for our own and the participants' legal advantage. Participants in my proposed updated Asch conformity experiment would be allowed to leave the experiment at any point if they experienced any discomfort, as part of the informed consent process. In the debriefing script, we would also have participants record the experimental conditional to which they were assigned throughout the experiment. We would also provide participants with

the researchers' email and phone numbers so that they can learn about the study's findings and discussions. It would be a great step forward from the initial study done in the 1950s to inquire about the participants' feelings of stress during the trial. That can be looked into to give the talks more meat, and researchers can make notes on how to make future studies less stressful for participants' mental health. References

Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions on personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 258- 290. Asch, S. E. (1955). Opinions and social pressures. Scientific American , 11, 32-36. Asch, S. E. (1952). Group forces in the modification and distortion of judgments. Back, K. W., Bogdonoff, M. D., Shaw, D. M., & Klein, R. F. (1963). An interpretation of experimental conformity through physiological measures. Behavioral Science, 8 (1), 34. Fitzgerald, M. H. (2005) Punctuated equilibrium, moral panics and the ethics review process. Journal of Academic Ethics 2(4): 315–338 Forsyth, D. R., & Pope, W. R. (1984). Ethical ideology and judgments of social psychological research: Multidimensional analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46 (6), 1365-1375. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.46.6.1365. Fujita, Y. and Mori, K. (2017). Group versus Individual Reward in the Asch Experiment without Confederates. Open Journal of Social Sciences , 5, 396-402. doi: 10.4236/jss.2017.55027 . Hayes, N. (1995). Ethical Issues in Psychological Research. Psychology in Perspective , 35-52. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-23862-0_3. Perrin, S., & Spencer, C. (1980). The Asch effect: a child of its time? Bulletin of the British Psychological Society , 32, 405-406.

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