Ethics What are they? Where do they come from? Why are they important?

Read the following ethical dilemma:

Hit and Run
One morning you are driving to work, and as per usual you are running a bit late, so you are
driving a touch faster than the speed limit. You reach down to your stereo to change the CD, when all of a sudden your car hits
something solid. You spin to a stop, but not before several more cars have run into you and each other in an attempt to avoid
the accident.
As you look up and out of your car, you can see that you hit a person, and that the person is not looking very good. In fact, you
are sure that they are dead. You shakily get out of your car, and look around at the damage that has been caused. Several cars
have been badly smashed up, but more importantly you have killed someone with your careless driving.
As you are standing there in shock, a woman comes up to you, tears running down her face, and obviously very shook up. As a
natural reaction, you ask her what is wrong. She gives you a funny look, and then she explains that she just ran over someone.
You ask her where this person is, and she points towards the person that you ran over!
You dont understand why, but for some reason this woman thinks that she caused this accident and killed the person, when in
fact you are well aware that you were the cause. Whoever accepts the blame is likely to be placed in jail for a very long time. If
you let the woman take the blame, there is a very good chance you will get away with it all. However, there is also the chance
that you could be placed in jail for even longer for trying to cover it up and you are a single dad with a disabled childwho
depends on you..
Write your reasons for admitting to the hit and run and reasons why you would let the woman take the blame.
What would you do?
Where do you think you learnt about the right and wrong of behaviours? What was/is the strongest influence?
What behaviours would you consider unethical in your life? In your world?


Psych In Action- available on Compass and in hard copy [ Read pages 49- 56]
Is the greater good of society more important than individual pain or suffering?
In Nazi concentration camps experiments were conducted on prisoners for example:
Freezing Experiments: Prisoners were immersed into tanks of ice water for hours at a time, often shivering to death, to discover how long
German pilots downed by enemy fire could survive the frozen waters of the North Sea. It was generally known at the time that human
beings did not survive immersion in the North Sea for more than one to two hours.
Should the results be used by modern scientists to advance medical knowledge? Would it be right or wrong? Unethical?
Is injecting orphaned children with a disease and then trialling a new drug on them ethical? Is putting university volunteers in a psych
experiment alone in a darkened cell for two weeks to see how prisoner of war cope with solitary confinement ethical?
Answer the following in point form:[ Page 5o]
1. What are ethics? Why did the Australian Psychological society create a Code of Ethics
2. What are the responsibilities of the researcher? Participants rights? Professional conduct?
3. Draw a visual poster of the 7 ethical guidelines with labels.
4. Animal Research- 10% of research is conducted on animals / half of this % are primates [
monkeys and apes] 98% of our DNA is shared with the orangutan
Unlike humans animals cannot make the decisions humans do to participate in research and
therefore need protection .What are the ethical guidelines for using animals in research?

Unethical Experiments- pages 52- 56/URL link in Resources section of Compass [folder-
Introduction to psychology]
5. Construct a table in Word as follows:
Experiment Brief description of
experiment
Ethical guidelines/s broken
The Monster Study


The Stanford
Experiment

Monkey Drug Trials


Landis Facial
Expressions

Little Albert


Milgram-
Obedience

Harlows Monkeys


David Reimer