The placebo drink smells and tastes like alcohol. Everyone (regardless of condition) believes that they are getting alcohol. He then videotapes each person's communication behavior in a group setting with 10 other people (who are also randomly assigned to the placebo or alcohol condition). Participants sign an informed consent form saying that they are getting alcohol and that they will be participating in a group setting to get to know other people who are also drinking alcohol. They are not told that some of them will think they get alcohol when they are really sober. There are no ethical issues or problems presented by this case either. Deception was necessary to conduct research in this cases but the type of deception involved in serving placebos instead of alcohol would not present any risk of emotional or other harm to participants. Since the nature of the deception would not cause emotional distress or other conceivable harm to the participants, deception was ethically justifiable.

To be on the safe side, it would have been advisable here as well to include a statement in the informed consent form that disclosed the fact that deception may be an element of the study. In any case, the researcher would also have an ethical obligation to conduct a debriefing session with each participant to make sure that the deception and the behavior of the participants during the study did not cause emotional or other forms of harm to the participants.

4. Delia is studying a wealthy and mysterious cult for her doctoral dissertation. She is interested in the persuasion strategies that the cult employs. She successfully infiltrates...

After being in the cult for approximately 1 year she gains access to the inner circle where she finds that they are committing telephone fraud by bilking innocent senior citizens out of their retirement income. She is torn as to what to do. She needs to stay with them at least for 6-8 months to finish her field work but they are plundering serious $$. Delia decides to wait 6 months to finish her field study and then report the fraud to the local police and FBI.
Delia has violated a fundamental ethical duty by delaying her reporting the crimes to the police authorities. In this case, the ethical obligation to protect the welfare or the victims of the cult's criminal activities and to prevent additional victims from being harmed throughout the six-month period would greatly outweigh the any value of the study. Delia had an absolute duty to report the criminal activities to the authorities immediately even if it meant that her entire doctoral dissertation field study would have to be repeated.

The researcher's personal and professional interests are not comparable to the magnitude of harm to which the victims were being exposed during the period during which Delia failed to inform the authorities about the crimes. There were no other justifications of the value of her research to the public that would have been comparable to the harms she was allowing the cult members to conceal by failing to report them immediately.