1-1 Discussion
Module Overview11.html
Ethical Thinking and Decision Making in Psychology
Ethical Thinking and Decision-Making in Psychology
Rule #1: Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.
—Nordstrom's Employee Handbook
Figure 1.1 (tripleethos.com)
Ethics is a field of study, a point of contemplation, a philosophical orientation, and a first cousin to morality. Ethics delves into the world of what is considered just and unjust, right and wrong, and other position-taking postures regarding thought, action, and even emotion.
Every day you make decisions based on ethics, morality, and doing or not doing the right thing. We are people first and people become professionals. Our personal ethos follows us into our professional life. Psychologists in every specialty area take ethics courses every year of their professional careers. Ethics in psychology is required for licensing, for license renewal, and to comply with professional continuing educations requirements. Every field of study has its own unique applications of ethics to consider. For that reason, different disciplines require at least one, if not more, specialized course in ethics because all disciplines necessitate an ethical application of the skill sets employed in that field of work. For example, postsecondary programs in business, law, medicine, psychology, accounting, engineering, and mathematics mandate applied courses in ethics as part of their curricula. With an infinite number of possible scenarios of ethical conflict that could arise in related professional settings, psychology is no exception.
The term ethics originates from the Greek word ethos, which refers to a custom or habit. We seek to make just, fair, honest, accurate, and humane decisions in the field of psychology. We seek to have these decisions become habitual and customary, rather than an exception. It sounds simple, yet it is extremely complex. It would not be until 1953 when the American Psychological Association (APA) would first publish Ethical Standards of Psychologists. It would take a number of unethical incidents in research, child and adolescent psychology, industrial/organizational psychology, and forensic psychology before the APA had a critical mass of understanding that could lead the way to establishing five guiding principles and 10 standards. Under each of the 10 standards exist several to a dozen or more case standards. We will be learning both the standards and principles in this course.
In Module One we will explore your current mind-set around ethics and ethical decision making. We will define professional ethics through a personal lens of daily ethical examples. Vigilant and ethical postures will be defined and considered.
We will look at the conditions that can make for unethical decision making, risk management, and unethical mental health professionals. Some conditions are unavoidable, such as conflicts of interest that present and could not have been anticipated. For example, if you are working in a school and counseling a child around disruptive classroom behavior and then find out that the child’s father is your husband’s boss. Consider another situation where you have just finished a long day of clinical counseling with clients. You go to your favorite bar to have a drink and one of your current clients comes over and asks to buy you another drink. Do you accept the drink? Do you leave the bar? Do you do something else?
Ethics in psychology orients around obtaining a firm understanding of your personal ethics, a professional understanding of what is expected of you in your professional orientation, and skill sets to work with problem solving your way through complex scenarios. In psychology we have many historical examples of bad ethics and poor ethical decision making. Some of the more famous examples include: the Milgram Study in 1975, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the David Reimer case, the 1960 well of despair, the learned helplessness studies of 1965, the case of Little Albert in 1920, the 1924 Landis facial expression experiments, the monkey drug trials of 1969, the aversion project of the 1970s and 1980s, and the Monster Study of 1939. There are many dozens more examples of unethical or questionable choices made in the name of psychology.
Let’s take a deeper look as we continue through Module One.
References
Mason, D. (2013, April 30). Ethics [Photograph]. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/35935741@N07/8903961105. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). May 31, 2013 at 2:29:30 PM EDT.