Utilitarianism Ethical Theory Application
Question Description
Develop reasoned decisions for addressing the case study dilemmas. Base your decisions on the Utilitarianism Theory
Post a one-paragraph summary of your decision for each of the cases (two paragraphs total). The summary should include a theoretical justification for your decision.
Case 1
Ann Smith is a social psychologist who wants to study attitude change. She submits a proposal to her institution outlining details of a study that will examine the attitude change of participants following a workshop on environmental issues. Smith plans to identify attitude change by administering a pretest and a posttest. She is worried, however, that the participants will recognize that she is looking for changes in their attitudes and that this knowledge will influence their answers on the posttest. To address this problem, she plans to disguise the issues she is most interested in; when she administers the tests, she will give a very broad explanation that does not fully disclose the nature of the study. Her proposal includes these procedures and an explanation of why she believes they are necessary; she also includes a plan to "debrief" the subjects (tell them the real purpose of the study) after they finish taking the second test.
Case 3
In a research proposal modeling a familiar experimental manipulation to study people's altruistic, or "helping," behavior, Ann Smith plans to place one subject in a room with several experimental confederates. She will assign the group a task, supposedly the purpose of the experiment, then arrange for an "emergency" to occur in the vicinity of the laboratory -- the group will hear a loud thud from an adjacent room and then a piercing cry for help. She will instruct confederates to look up upon hearing the cry, then return to their task. In a pilot test of this procedure, the single subject looked around uncomfortably, then returned to the assigned task, as the confederates did. Following the experiment, the subjects will be debriefed about the true purpose of the research.
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