Asch’s Conformity Experiment (year 12 Psychology ncea level 2) PDF

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Ncea level 2 psychology assessment

Ethics In Psychological Practice...

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Ethics In Psychological Practice Ethics are moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity. We need a code of ethics as psychology is a subject that deals with human and animal behaviour and it is necessary to protect participants involved in any interaction as they can be socially sensitive and this was done by creating a group of guidelines. For example, New Zealand has a code of ethics that is split into four principles; Respect for the Dignity of Persons and Peoples, Responsible Caring, Integrity in Relationships, and Social Justice and Responsibility to Society. In Integrity in Relationships, the principle is split into four value statements each with a practice implication, one for example is 3.2: Personal Values - Psychologists should not let their own values colour their judgement. Practice Implication - Psychologists need to be aware of their own values and ensure these do not have an effect on their work. The purpose of this report is to comprehensively examine the ethical issues in a psychological practice and I will achieve this by examining the breaches using Asch’s Conformity Experiment and using the Code of Ethics for Psychologists Working in Aotearoa/New Zealand (2002). The reason for the development of a code of ethics is that of the fault of past experiments such as the Nazi Human Experimentation where a group of German physicians conducted painful and deadly experiments on thounsands of prisoners at concentration camps without their permission and very few of the physicians were ever indicted or disciplined professionally (1). The Asch’s Conformity Experiment was conducted by Solomon Asch in 1951 to ‘investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform’. His experiment was to have the participant give their answer last in a group of eight people in a line judgment task where there was an obvious answer. As the other people were in on it and gave an obvious wrong answer, if the participant gave a wrong answer, it would be clear that it was due to social pressure from the group. Solomon Asch found that on average, one third (32%) of participants conformed to the incorrect answer. Over the twelve trials about 75% of participants conformed at least once with the other 25% never conforming. In a control group with no pressure, less than 1% of participants gave an incorrect answer. However, using the lens of the current code (Code of Ethics for Psychologists Working in Aotearoa/New Zealand) when examining the experiment in today's age , we noticed that his research is ethically questionable as many breaches have been made but I will only be discussing two significant breaches today. The ethical guidelines that were broken were deception and protection from harm (2.6). 2.6. Well-being of Human Research Participants: Value Statement: In carrying out research, psychologists recognise that a basic ethical expectation is that research activities will benefit members of society or, at least, do no harm Practice Implications: 2.6.4. Psychologists take all reasonable steps to protect research participants from physical and mental discomfort or danger

This ethical guideline was broken during Asch’s experiment as many of the participants reported feeling stressed when they disagreed with the majority of the group. There is also evidence that the participants were highly emotional as they had greatly increased levels of autonomic arousal meaning they were in a conflicted situation when deciding whether to give the correct answer or conform to the others views. This meant that Asch didn't protect the research participants from mental discomfort as the ethical guideline suggests he does....