TY - JOUR
T1 - Participants' postexperimental reactions and the ethics of bystander research
AU - Schwartz, Shalom H.
AU - Gottlieb, Avi
PY - 1981/7
Y1 - 1981/7
N2 - Researchers and review boards lack an empirical base for evaluating the ethics of proposed research procedures. This paper contributes to such a base by reporting participants' postexperimental affective reactions to bystander experiments employing deception and their evaluations of the ethics of these experiments. Anonymous "ethics" questionnaires were administered to 231 subjects who had participated in one of three laboratory experiments on helping and had been debriefed. Participants reported very little negative affect. Most viewed the research as ethically justified, and found their participation both instructive and enjoyable. There was little variation in reactions as a function of subjects' sex, the particular experiment they had participated in, and their behavior during the experiment. Implications of these findings for assessing the ethics of future deceptive and stressful research are discussed.
AB - Researchers and review boards lack an empirical base for evaluating the ethics of proposed research procedures. This paper contributes to such a base by reporting participants' postexperimental affective reactions to bystander experiments employing deception and their evaluations of the ethics of these experiments. Anonymous "ethics" questionnaires were administered to 231 subjects who had participated in one of three laboratory experiments on helping and had been debriefed. Participants reported very little negative affect. Most viewed the research as ethically justified, and found their participation both instructive and enjoyable. There was little variation in reactions as a function of subjects' sex, the particular experiment they had participated in, and their behavior during the experiment. Implications of these findings for assessing the ethics of future deceptive and stressful research are discussed.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0013493517&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/0022-1031(81)90046-9
DO - 10.1016/0022-1031(81)90046-9
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AN - SCOPUS:0013493517
SN - 0022-1031
VL - 17
SP - 396
EP - 407
JO - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
JF - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
IS - 4
ER -