The Rough Guide to Psychology An Introduction to Human Behaviour and the Mind (Rough Guides)

THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY
Another challenge for contemporary psychology researchers is to
conduct experiments that are deemed to be ethically acceptable. Many
of the classic experiments in psychology, such as the willingness of
participants to follow orders and punish a person with an electric shock,
simply wouldn’t be allowed today, on ethical grounds. That isn’t to say
that psychologists aren’t proving ingenious when it comes to finding
ways round such problems, for example by replicating classic research
on obedience using virtual reality.
While offering exciting opportunities, technological advances are also
posing new problems. Functional brain imaging, for example, gener-
ates a bewildering amount of complex data and it can seem at times as
though psychology is struggling to keep up. In 2009, the brain imaging
community was rocked by the “Voodoo Correlations” controversy, in
which many respected researchers were accused of analysing their find-
ings inappropriately (see p.45).
It’s also worth remembering that psychology is a young science. There
are few taken-for-granted facts and many contradictory findings. When
biologists refer to genes or chemists refer to the elements, there’s a
consensus about what these things are and what they mean. But when
books are written about psychology, there’s a tendency to back up any
factual claims with reference to specific experiments – a tradition that is
continued throughout this book.
The applied professions of psychology aren’t without their problems
either. In 2008 and 2009, for example, the American Psychological
Association found itself repeatedly on the defensive over the role of
psychologists in interrogation practices conducted at Guantánamo Bay
and elsewhere during the Bush era. In the UK, meanwhile, it wasn’t until
2009 that the government finally put into law the statutory regulation
of psychologists. Up until then, anyone could legally call themselves a
psychologist, a situation little changed from the nineteenth century.