Text 4.1 Risks, Benefits, Scary Stories and the Media

Risks

Risks for human subjects can be physical, psychological, social, legal, and economic. These include possible discomforts, hazards or inconveniences to the subjects related to the subjects' participation in the research. The probability, magnitude, duration, and reversibility of the risks should be described in the application.

Participants should be told of all known risks associated with participating in a study. These risks could be invasive procedures, confidentiality risks, experimental drug usage, etc.

Benefits

Benefits to Science or Society

Human participants have played a critical role in the advancement of medical, societal, emotional, and psychological research. Social benefits of research can be defined as having a good outcome if the research benefits someone other than the research subject. A deeper issue with this is that not everyone can agree on what is good for society.

Benefits to Research Participants

According to the University of Nevada (2021), participant benefits can take the form of therapy, education, information, resources, or empowerment. The benefits of a study must be clarified to participants so that they understand how or in what way the particular research study may be beneficial.

Scary Stories

The Stanford Prison Experiment

In 1973, Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo conducted a psychological experiment to investigate the hypothesis that for guards and prisoners in American prisons, it is a person's role in the prison environment rather than their individual personality traits that causes their behavior.

Three students in beds behind prison bars

The experiment was supposed to run for two weeks. However, it ran for only six days. The experiment was terminated "due to the emotional breakdowns of prisoners and excessive aggression of the guards."

The problem with the experiment is that it is unknown to what degree the participants were genuinely under duress and/or acting aggressively, and to what degree they were acting. Not even the participants knew for sure. But one thing we do know is that "participants playing the role of prisoners were not protected from psychological harm, and experienced incidents of humiliation and distress."

This study did lead to "the formal recognition of ethical guidelines by the American Psychological Association. Studies must now undergo an extensive review by an institutional review board [IRB] (US) or ethics committee (UK) before they are implemented."

Milgram Experiment

A man sits behind a desk labeled E for experimenter. To the right of the experimenter is another man at a desk labeled T for teacher. A wall is drawn and on the other side of the wall is a third man sitting at a desk labeled L for Learner. In 1963, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram "wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II." This question led to one of the most (in)famous studies of obedience ever carried out in the field of psychology.

Milgram wanted to know how far a person would go in obeying an instruction versus when their inner conscience would stop them from permitting any further harm to another person.

One man, "the teacher (T)," would be set up in one room with the researcher (or experimenter (E)). Another man, "the learner (L)," would be placed in another room strapped to an electric shock generator. The task of the "teacher" was to teach pairs of words to the "learner." Each time the "learner" failed to recall a word pair, he would receive an electric shock. As the experiment went on, the shocks increased in voltage.

🤔 Was this experiment worth it in the end? Was the psychological damage too much?

And the Media

🤔 What happens when the media gets a hold of an experiment that may go wrong? Sometimes it results in sensationalism and widespread panic.

Observation room with medical beds and patients L. Stobbart and colleagues decided to study the effects that media coverage can have on the public if an experiment goes awry. In this case, it was the TGN1412 trial.

On March 13, 2006, eight men volunteered to be in the first phase of a "clinical trial of TGN1412, an agnostic anti-CD28 monoclonal antibody being developed by TeGenero [in a London-based research facility] to treat various diseases in which T cells are involved, such as chronic inflammatory disorders or hematological malignancies."

The trial quickly went horribly wrong. Within hours of getting the drug, all participants experienced severe side effects caused by severe inflammatory responses. Due to the side effects, one man had parts of his fingers and toes amputated, another lost his entire foot and one man had his head swell up so large that the trial earned the nickname "The Elephant Man Trial."

According to L. Stobbart, et. al. (2007), press coverage at the time went with one of three themes: "human tragedy," "good science, bad science," and "engagement in science." At first, the stories focused on the drug trial, but then they quickly moved to the "lurid details" of what the participants and their friends and family members were going through. After all, everybody loves a good story; whether that story is tragedy or heroism depends on the authors.

References

360. Benefits | Research Integrity. University of Nevada, Reno. (2022). Retrieved 25 January 2022, from https://www.unr.edu/research-integrity/human-research/human-research-protection-policy-manual/360-benefits.

Mcleod, S. (2017). The Milgram shock experiment. Milgram Experiment | Simply Psychology. Retrieved January 6, 2022, from https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

Mcleod, S. (2020). The Stanford Prison Experiment. Stanford Prison Experiment | Simply Psychology. Retrieved January 6, 2022, from https://www.simplypsychology.org/zimbardo.html

Prisoners in bed in cell by Philip Zimbardo is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Resnik, D. (2022). Social Benefits of Human Subjects Research. PubMed Central (PMC). Retrieved 25 January 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3920587/.

Sauer, S. (2021, March 23). Top 10 clinical trials that went horribly wrong. Listverse. Retrieved January 6, 2022, from https://listverse.com/2017/06/19/top-10-clinical-trials-that-went-horribly-wrong/

Stobbart, L., Murtagh, M. J., Rapley, T., Ford, G. A., Louw, S. J., & Rodgers, H. (2007). "We saw human guinea pigs explode". BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 334(7593), 566–567. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.39150.488264.47