Archetype Home

 

Psychology Ethics: Research

All psychological research conducted through universities (examples outside site) and hospitals (examples outside site) (read: most research) has to be approved (ethics code outside site) by an Institutional Review Board.

Too often fictional "doctors" blatantly put personal little research experiments first. The movie The Jacket (IMDb outside site) stands out as a particularly strong example. To be fair, the ethics code was developed because some experiments went too far. The most famous are Milgram's Obedience Experiment and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment.

Dr. Milgram died in 1984, but Dr. Zimbardo, at Stanford University, is one of the most famous living psychologists today. A film made about the Stanford Prison Experiment, Quiet Rage, is regularly used in college classes and military training to help people understand the power of situation.