Little Albert

[monkeywantsabanana]

Hey guys,

It seems a tad confusing to me with the ethical principle of INFORMED CONSENT of the Watsons and Rayner Experiment on Little Albert.

In the Grivas book it states: " The issue of informed consent is not referred to in the original journal article reporting the exterment, so a judgement about this ethical consideration cannot be made "


I just did an Insight MC paper and it states: "Because his mother had given permission for Little Albert to participate in the experiment, Watson and Rayner were authorised to test their hypothesis on him. This satisfied the requirement of informed consent"

At a lecture, I was told that "Albert's parents were not told what would be invalid in the experiment and did not agree that he could take part"

So there you go, three different statements. Which one would you go with? Was the ethical principle met or breached?

[Russ]

Via any current ethical standard the experiment was so unethical you wouldn't even bother suggesting it.
At the time however, ethics was a very different beast - Nuremberg hadn't happened and the experiment was considered to be acceptable, even though there was limited consent.

So there are two different parts to the answer (I'd also state that the "ethics" governing an experiment depend upon contemporary values)

[REBORN]

By VCAA informed consent was breached

[Slumdawg]

Definitely go with option 3 I based most of the connect Ed psych notes on knowledge from a large range of assessors reports so you can trust it haha. And this is no exception, according to the chief assessor it was breached..

[Russ]

Have a read of this if you're interested

[playsimme]

Once again grivas fails.. -_-