Ethical considerations are an important part of the design of any study. The cognitive approach studies cognitive processes such as memory.  Manipulating people’s memories – or challenging their memories – may have a negative effect on their self-esteem or self-confidence. And yet, we have learned a lot about how memories are formed and how they affect our behaviour by carrying out experiments.  Deception is often used in experiments of false memories. Challenging the accuracy of people’s memories may lead to undue stress.  And in order to study memory distortion, often researchers use longitudinal research, where participants must have the right to withdraw.

Several studies investigating memory distortion and false memories make use of deception.  There are two types of deception used in psychological research – deception by omission and deception by commission.  Loftus and Palmer carried out a study on the misinformation effect by using deception by omission – that is, leaving out information about the study when getting consent.  Participants were asked to watch films of car accidents.  They were then given a questionnaire which asked them information about the film that they saw.  The key question was “how fast was the car going when it hit the other car?”  However, there were five different conditions.  The verb in the question was changed with different intensities (contacted, crashed, etc) to see if the memory of the speed was affected by the way the leading question was phrased.  In this case, the researchers had told the participants that they were testing their skills as an eyewitness, but they did not tell them exactly what the researcher was testing.  This is common practice in psychology.  The researcher has to justify that the deception was necessary and that no harm would come to the individual as a result. Often the reason that deception is used is to avoid demand characteristics; if the participants know what the goal of the experiment is, they may change their natural behaviour to either help the research (expectancy effect) or not help the researcher (screw you effect). In this case, it is unlikely that the act of deception itself would have led to undue stress; however, the act of watching a video of a car crash might.  But the participants were informed about the videos prior to giving their consent and the videos were taken from drivers education films and were not in any way traumatic.  If they had surprised the participants with traumatic car crash videos, this would have been potential undue stress or harm.

Deception by commission is when the researcher actively lies to the participants.  In a study by Julia Shaw, she told participants that their parents had shared a story about an event in their childhood where they got in a fight with another person and the police had to be called. Over the course of several sessions, in which the participants were asked to relax and visualize the scene, the majority of participants developed a false memory of committing a crime and reported that the false memories felt real.  In this case, the researcher was manipulating the autobiographical memories of the participants and this brings up important ethical considerations. The researcher did not reveal what the true aim of the study was as this would have made the study impossible to do.  The researcher claimed that the parents had told her the story, which was factually untrue. At the end of the research, the participants must be debriefed.  It is possible that the research could have a negative effect on the participants; finding out that memories of your own life may not be accurate may lead to feelings of insecurity about oneself. Also, a sense of embarrassment or a feeling that one was manipulated may lead to a lack of trust of psychologists which could have a negative impact on people’s willingness to take part in future psychological research. Shaw also filmed the interviews in order to document the development of the memories.  It is important that the participants have the right to anonymity and that these videos not be used without the participants’ permission.  In spite of these concerns, participants may feel that the lesson was important – that when people try to convince you of a past event for which you initially have no memory, there is the danger of the creation of false memories.  Research like the work done by Loftus & Palmer and Julia Shaw has helped to improve the way that police work with eyewitnesses and has led to a more critical approach to the way that therapists view “repressed memories.”

Finally, ethical considerations may affect the validity of the results of longitudinal research.  While Shaw tried to manipulate her participants’ memories, Neisser and Harsh wanted to see what happened to memories over time – without manipulation.  In their study, they had university students write down autobiographical information about what they were doing when they heard of a national tragedy – the Challenger explosion.  Two and a half years later, they asked the students to do it again.  They found that although they were confident of their memories, many of the details of where they were, whom they were with, and what they were doing had changed over the 2.5 years. Researchers have to give participants the right to withdraw; even though students took part in the first part of the study, they cannot be forced to take part in the second part of the study. In this study, there were 106 students who took part in the first round, but only 44 that took part in the second round.  In some cases, the students were no longer at the university.  Some were not interested in the follow-up session. Participant attrition as a result of this ethical consideration can mean that the sample becomes biased over time.  Perhaps the students who were in the final sample were those who felt that strongest about what had happened and had discussed it more frequently – which may have affected their memories. As sample sizes get smaller, the participants are less representative of the population from which they were drawn.

Ethical considerations are an important part of psychology.  Following ethics not only protects participants, but it helps to develop trust between participants and the field of psychology. Without participants, we cannot do research.  When ethical considerations are not followed, there needs to be a justification that should be reviewed by an ethics panel. Deception, for example, must be justified and its potential effect on participants should be discussed.  Debriefing, anonymity, and the right to withdraw are important ways to protect participants when they feel that this deception was not justified or that the study is stressful for them.