Plicker card activity data ethics

Two students want to run an experiment about whether people

are more likely to answer a survey question from a man in a
suit or a man dressed in everyday clothing. They go to the mall
with one dressed each way and carry out their experiment on
unsuspecting mall patrons

A) Unethical! These mall patrons should
have been asked for consent in order to
run this experiment.
C) Ethical! Patrons WERE asked for
consent
B) Ethical! The mall patrons had no
chance of experiencing harm because of
this experiment, and consent would have
ruined the experiment
D) Ethical, as long as the results are
confidential with respect to participants
names
Stanford University wants to know what would happen if you
arbitrarily gave untrained students power over other students.
In their experiment they got twelve subjects, with consent, and
flipped a coin. Six were assigned as prisoners, the other six
were guards. After two days the prisoners rioted over the
conditions of the makeshift prison

A) Unethical! Danger to the subjects, plus B) Ethical! The students consented to be

they had no way of knowing what they in a fake prison with no guarantee that
were in for when they consented they would be assigned the role they
wanted to be assigned
A professor wants to know how people respond to peer
pressure. He sits in a room with a subject, with his partner
behind a wall. Consent was given by the subject. He asks a
question to his partner. Whenever his partner answers
incorrectly, the subject gives an electric shock. When he is
hesitant, the professor encourages him to give a shock. The
data is the amount of shocks the subject is willing to give. The
shocks are not real, but the partner reacts like they are.

A) Unethical! The subject did consent, B) Ethical! The subject consented, and
but he consented to something totally there is no actual harm being done to
different from what he is actually doing anybody involved in the study
In the 1930’s Solomon Asch conducted an experiment where he had
subjects try to identify which of three lines was closest to 45 degrees
from the horizontal. He made this a matched pairs experiment where
the subject was competing with himself. The treatment was that in
one of the sessions, the student was alone, and in the other session
the student was with two other people (part of Asch’s team) who
would both agree on an incorrect answer being the correct answer.
The subject was never told which answer was correct.

A) Unethical! That is gaslighting from 90 B) Ethical! Nobody was harmed, this

years ago. could create excellent data for future
studies, and the subject would have no
way of knowing he was being coerced
into answering incorrectly.