What are two things that experimenters try to protect their subject from in research?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

1) Deception – Deception is used in social experiments to create more “realistic” treatments, often within the confines of a laboratory. You learned in Chapter 3 about Stanley Milgram’s (1965) use of deception in his classic study of obedience to authority. Volunteers were recruited for what they were told was a study of the learning process, not a study of obedience to authority. The experimenter told the volunteers that they were administering electric shocks to a “student” in the next room, when there were actually neither students nor shocks. Subjects seemed to believe the deception.
Debriefing is a session after an experiment in which all instances of deception are revealed and explained and participants are allowed to ask questions.
Whether or not you believe that you could be deceived in this way, you are not likely to be invited to participate in an experiment such as Milgram’s. Current federal regulations preclude deception in research that might trigger such upsetting feelings. However, deception is still routine in many college laboratories. The question that must always be answered is, “Is there sufficient justification to allow the use of deception?” David Willer and Henry A. Walker (2007) pay particular attention to debriefing after deception in their book about experimental research. They argue that every experiment involving deception should be followed immediately for each participant with debriefing, sometimes called dehoaxing, in which the deception is explained, and all the participants’ questions are answered to their satisfaction and those participants who still feel aggrieved are directed to a university authority to file a complaint or to a counselor for help with their feelings. This is sound advice.
2) Selective Distribution of Benefits – Field experiments conducted to evaluate social programs also can involve issues of informed consent (Hunt, 1985). One ethical issue that is somewhat unique to field experiments is the selective distribution of benefits: How much are subjects harmed by the way treatments are distributed in the experiment? For example, Sherman and Berk’s (1984) experiment, and its successors, required police to make arrests in domestic violence cases largely on the basis of a random process. When arrests were not made, did the subjects’ abused spouses suffer? Selective distribution of benefits An ethical issue about how much researchers can influence the benefits subjects receive as part of the treatment being studied in a field experiment.
Is it ethical to give some potentially advantageous or disadvantageous treatment to people on a random basis? For example, in the drug court field experiment, is it ethical to randomly assign those who wanted extra help with their drug problem to the comparison group that did not receive extra treatment? Random distribution of benefits is justified when the researchers do not know whether some treatment actually is beneficial—and, of course, it is the goal of the experiment to find out. Chance is as reasonable a basis for distributing the treatment as any other. Also, if insufficient resources are available to fully fund a benefit for every eligible person, distribution of the benefit on the basis of chance to equally needy persons is ethically defensible (Boruch, 1997).