When you got your driver’s license, you were told that driving “is a privilege, not a right.” When psychologists get their “research license”—the education and credentials that enable them to do research—they’re told the same thing. Conducting research is a privilege. The rights that need to be protected are those of the research participants.

All research in psychology, whether conducted with people or animals, is evaluated by an Institutional Review Board (IRB), a group of professionals who assess the ethics of a proposed research study. The IRB determines whether planned research is acceptable according to the principles and moral beliefs of society as a whole. All institutions that conduct research—universities, hospitals, and so forth— maintain an IRB.

Prior to conducting any study, researchers submit detailed plans for that study to their IRB. It decides whether the study can be run by weighing the study’s benefits (the scientific knowledge gained) against its costs (the inconvenience and potential risk to participants).

IRBs in the United States function according to principles spelled out in the Belmont Report (National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1979), a document that guides the conduct of all research involving human beings. The report, and the nation’s overall system for reviewing research ethics, developed in response to historical events, the most significant of which was the Tuskegee Study.

The Tuskegee Study was research, sponsored by the U.S. government, on syphilis, a bacterial disease spread by sexual contact. Researchers wanted to learn how the disease develops and maintains itself in the body in the absence of treatment. To find out, in 1932 they began a long-term study of a group of African American men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who were diagnosed with the disease. In a gross violation of ethics, the researchers did not inform the participants that they had the disease. Furthermore, they did not offer the participants penicillin, an effective treatment for syphilis, when it became available some years after the study began. These egregious ethical violations fueled a distrust of the research process among African Americans that has lasted into the twenty-first century (Shavers, Lynch, & Burmeister, 2000).

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The ethical principles that govern research are designed to avoid ethical horrors such as those of the Tuskegee experiment. Three principles are particularly important guides to research in psychology:

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Finally, at the conclusion of a study, a debriefing procedure conducted by the experimenter fully informs participants about the research in which they have taken part. Debriefing is particularly critical when experimenters cannot inform participants about all aspects of a study at its start because that information would invalidate the study’s procedures. Experimenters must ensure that participants fully understand the procedures and purposes of the research.

Ethical principles also govern research with animals. Researchers must minimize distress or pain suffered by animals used in studies, as well as the number of animals used. Studies of animals constitute only a small percentage of psychology’s overall research effort. Nonetheless, they have proven to be of great value not only to basic science, but also to applications that benefit human welfare. Many effective treatments for physical and mental health problems have been based on research conducted originally with animals (Miller, 1985).

In the United States, formal procedures for evaluating the ethics of research have been in place since the 1970s. They are part of U.S. law. Virtually every study you read about in the chapters ahead, therefore, exemplifies not only the scientific principles you learned throughout this chapter, but also the ethical principles enforced by an IRB.