Psychology Class Work
Psychology Class Work
Ethics
Read the following scenarios and answer the reflection questions that follow.
Jennifer and Bethany have both recently declared psychology as their majors. One evening as they are looking over their required courses, they start talking.
Jennifer: “I don’t see why we have to learn statistics and research methods! I am never going to use them anyway. I want to be a counselor and I am just going to deal with each person as an individual. Science treats everyone as if they are interchangeable and totally predictable. In fact, I think people would be better counselors and teachers and social workers if they didn’t take research classes at all, because then they would treat everyone as individuals, not clones.”
Bethany: “People are a lot more predictable than you think. Psychologists have learned so much about human behavior in the last hundred years or so using the scientific method. I really believe that if you can figure out all the factors that are affecting someone’s behavior, you can be pretty accurate in figuring out what they are going to do. I’ve decided that I want to be a researcher, because I think I can help more people in the long run than you will as a therapist. As a researcher, I can develop programs that will help a lot of people who suffer from the same problem. A therapist can only help one person at a time, and sometimes it takes years for a person to get better.”
Reflection Questions:
a. How do Jennifer and Bethany differ in their understanding of what people are like? With whom do you agree more, and why?
b. What is ethically troubling about taking Jennifer’s position to the extreme? What would happen if therapists received no training in the scientific study of human behavior?
c. What is ethically troubling about taking Bethany’s position to the extreme? What is the problem with assuming that if you can figure out all the variables (genes, environment, etc.) you can perfectly predict people’s behavior?
Dr. Franklin designed a treatment for panic attacks and tried it with all of her clients who suffered from such attacks, and had great success. Over a ten-year period, Dr. Franklin treated more than 100 clients, in all of whom the technique significantly reduced panic. The treatment consisted of the therapist (Dr. Franklin) leading the patient through a series of relaxation exercises in her office. Dr. Franklin was so excited about the success of this treatment that she decided to market it to therapists nationwide. For $33 (admittedly reasonable for a psychological measure or technique), she sent therapists a script of everything she said to the patient during the relaxation exercises. A lot of therapists purchased the treatment, because they were very impressed with the success rate that Dr. Franklin reported. However, six months later, Dr. Franklin started to receive calls, letters, and e-mails from therapists all over the country, who complained that the treatment had proven completely useless for their clients.
Reflection Questions:
How would you explain the fact that Dr. Franklin had so much success and the other therapists such failure? How would reliability analyses have helped this problem?
From an ethical point of view, why should Dr. Franklin have done reliability analyses before marketing her treatment program?
