7 Questionable ethical conduct

It is important to look back in time to understand what has led us to focus on ethical research.

Indeed, research on humans has not always been regulated in the way that it is today. History is rife with disturbing human experiments that continued without much law or policy intervention until after the end of World War II. It was at this time, in 1946, that the first trial involving twenty-three war criminals from Germany’s Third Reich, was held. These individuals, 20 of whom were doctors, faced trial for crimes against humanity, which included medical experiments on concentration camp inmates who were tortured and murdered during these experiments. Sixteen of the 23 defendants were eventually found guilty, and received sentences ranging from execution to 10 years’ imprisonment. The trials, conducted in Nuremberg, Germany, led to the creation of the Nuremberg Code in 1949 (Shuster, 1997). The code, a 10-point set of research principles, was designed to guide doctors and scientists who conduct research on human participants. Today, the Nuremberg Code guides medical and other research conducted on human participants, including social scientific research. Read the Nuremberg Code.

Medical scientists are not the only researchers who have undertaken unethical research on humans. In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram (1974) conducted a series of experiments designed to understand obedience to authority, in which he tricked participants into believing they were administering an electric shock to other participants. In fact, the shocks were not real at all, but some, though not many, of Milgram’s research participants experienced extreme emotional distress after the experiment (Palys & Atchison, 2014). A reaction of emotional distress is understandable. The realisation that one is willing to administer painful shocks to another human being just because someone who looks authoritative has told you to do so might indeed be traumatising—even if you later learn that the shocks were not real.

Watch Milgram Experiment on Obedience from the Khan Academy.

Around the same time that Milgram conducted his experiments, sociology graduate student Laud Humphreys (1970) was collecting data for his dissertation research related to the practice of men engaging in anonymous sexual encounters in public restrooms (known as the tearoom trade). Humphreys wished to understand who these men were and why they participated in the trade. To conduct his research, Humphreys offered to serve as a “watch queen,” the person who keeps an eye out for police and was then able to watch the sexual encounters in local park washrooms in major metropolitan areas in the United States. What Humphreys did not do was identify himself as a researcher to his research participants. Instead, he watched his participants for several months, getting to know several of them, learning more about the tearoom trade practice and, without the knowledge of his research participants, jotting down their license plate numbers as they pulled into or out of the parking lot near the restroom. After participating as a watch queen, with the help of several insiders who had access to motor vehicle registration information, Humphreys used those license plate numbers to obtain the names and home addresses of his research participants. Then, disguised as a public health researcher, Humphreys visited his participants in their homes and interviewed them about their lives and their health.

Humphreys’ research dispelled a good number of myths and stereotypes about the tearoom trade and its participants. He learned, for example, that over half of his participants were married to women and many of them did not identify as gay or bisexual. However, once Humphreys’ work became public, it created a quite a controversy, at his home university (e.g. the chancellor tried to have his degree revoked), among sociologists in general, and among members of the public, as it raised public concerns about the purpose and conduct of sociological research.

In the original version of his report, Humphreys defended the ethics of his actions. In 2008, years after Humphreys’ death, his book was reprinted with the addition of a retrospective on the ethical implications of his work (see Humphreys, 2008). In his written reflections on his research and the fallout from it, Humphreys maintained that his tearoom observations constituted ethical research on the grounds that those interactions occurred in public places. But Humphreys added that he would conduct the second part of his research differently. Rather than trace license numbers and interview unwitting tearoom participants in their homes under the guise of public health research, Humphreys instead would spend more time in the field and work to cultivate a pool of informants. Those informants would know that he was a researcher and would be able to fully consent to being interviewed. In the end, Humphreys concluded that “there is no reason to believe that any research participants have suffered because of my efforts, or that the resultant demystification of impersonal sex has harmed society” (2008, p. 231).

Other landmark ethics in research examples include the Stanford Prison Experiment, also in the 1970s, and the 1990s case of Russell Ogden and Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada.

Visit The Standford Prison Experiment (UQ login required).

References

Humphreys, L. (2008). Tearoom trade: Impersonal sex in public places, enlarged edition with a retrospect on ethical issues. Aldine Transaction.

Palys, T., & Atchison, C. (2014). Research decisions: Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods approaches (5th ed.). Nelson Education.

Shuster, E. (1997). Fifty years later: The significance of the Nuremberg Code. New England Journal of Medicine, 337(20), 1436-1440. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199711133372006