Research Ethics & the BPS Code

Psychology studies people, and people can be harmed — through stress, deception, invasion of privacy, or simply being treated as a means to an end. The history of the discipline includes studies (Milgram's obedience research, Zimbardo's prison simulation) that could not be run today in the same form. Modern psychology is therefore governed by a formal ethical framework: in the UK, the British Psychological Society (BPS) Code of Ethics and Conduct. This lesson sets out that framework, the specific ethical issues researchers must manage, and the machinery (cost–benefit analysis, ethics committees) that regulates research.

We cover the four ethical principles of the BPS Code — Respect, Competence, Responsibility and Integrity — and the specific issues nested under them: informed consent, right to withdraw, confidentiality, protection of participants, debriefing and deception. We then examine how researchers manage ethical issues, the logic of cost–benefit analysis, and the role of ethics committees. This content is examined directly in Component 01 and is essential AO3 vocabulary for evaluating the ethics of every study in Components 02 and 03.

Ethics is not a bolt-on to good research but a constraint that shapes what research can be done and how. There is a permanent tension between the pursuit of knowledge — which can tempt researchers to deceive, to withhold information, or to expose participants to stress in order to study real behaviour — and the duty of care owed to the people who make that knowledge possible. The BPS Code exists to resolve that tension in favour of participants' welfare and dignity, setting boundaries within which valid research must be conducted. Understanding the code is therefore essential both to doing psychology responsibly (including your own Practical Activities) and to evaluating it: many of the discipline's most famous studies are as notable for the ethical debates they provoked as for their findings, and the ability to identify, explain and weigh ethical issues is a core examined skill.

Spec Mapping

This lesson covers	OCR H567 Component 01 sub-area	AO focus
BPS Code — Respect (informed consent, right to withdraw, confidentiality)	1.3 — BPS Code of Ethics & Conduct	AO1; AO3
BPS Code — Competence	1.3 — BPS Code	AO1
BPS Code — Responsibility (protection of participants, debrief)	1.3 — BPS Code	AO1; AO3
BPS Code — Integrity (deception)	1.3 — BPS Code	AO1; AO3
Managing ethical issues; cost–benefit analysis; ethics committees	1.3 — methodological/ethical issues	AO2; AO3

Referenced descriptively; see the official OCR H567 specification and the BPS Code for exact wording. This lesson develops AO1 (the principles and issues), AO2 (applying them to a scenario — e.g. what ethical issues a proposed study raises) and AO3 (evaluating the ethics of research, including socially-sensitive research, via cost–benefit reasoning).

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The BPS Code of Ethics and Conduct: Four Principles

The BPS Code is built on four ethical principles. Each principle groups several specific issues. Organising the specific ethical issues under these four headings is genuinely useful, not merely tidy: it turns a long list of do's and don'ts into a coherent framework, and it helps in the exam because being able to say "this is an issue of Respect — specifically informed consent" demonstrates a structured understanding rather than a scatter of memorised terms. The four principles also express why each rule exists — Respect because participants are autonomous persons, Responsibility because researchers hold power over participants' welfare, Integrity because science depends on honesty, and Competence because good intentions do not substitute for expertise. Keeping the principle and its issues linked in your mind is the most reliable way to recall and apply the code.

graph TD
    A["BPS Code of Ethics and Conduct"] --> B["Respect"]
    A --> C["Competence"]
    A --> D["Responsibility"]
    A --> E["Integrity"]
    B --> B1["Informed consent<br/>Right to withdraw<br/>Confidentiality & privacy"]
    C --> C1["Work within one's<br/>professional competence"]
    D --> D1["Protection from harm<br/>Debriefing"]
    E --> E1["Honesty<br/>Managing deception"]
    style B fill:#2980b9,color:#fff
    style C fill:#16a085,color:#fff
    style D fill:#8e44ad,color:#fff
    style E fill:#c0392b,color:#fff

Respect

Respect requires researchers to value the dignity and worth of participants, including their privacy and right to self-determination. Its key issues are:

• Informed consent — participants must agree to take part knowing enough about the study (its purpose, what they will do, and their rights) to make an informed decision. Consent should be freely given and, for those under 16, obtained from a parent or guardian. Where full disclosure would ruin the study, alternatives include presumed consent (asking a similar group whether they would find it acceptable) and retrospective consent (obtained after the fact), though neither fully replaces genuine prior informed consent. The two words matter equally: consent must be informed (based on adequate understanding of what participation involves and what the risks are) and it must be genuine consent (freely given, without coercion or undue pressure, and revocable). Consent obtained by withholding key information, or under pressure, is not true informed consent. Special care is needed with participants who cannot fully consent for themselves — children, or people with certain conditions — where consent from a parent, guardian or other appropriate person is required, and where the researcher carries an even greater duty of protection.
• Right to withdraw — participants must be free to stop taking part at any time, without penalty, and to withdraw their data afterwards. Milgram's study is famously criticised here: participants who asked to stop were "prodded" to continue ("The experiment requires that you continue"), compromising their right to withdraw. The right has two components that are easy to conflate: the right to stop participating during the study, and the right to withdraw one's data afterward — often exercised at the debrief once participants understand what the study really involved. The right must be genuine, not nominal: it should be clearly communicated at the outset and honoured without pressure, penalty or the withholding of any promised payment. Milgram's "prods" are the textbook illustration of a right to withdraw that existed on paper but was systematically undermined in practice, and this is a central plank of the ethical criticism of his obedience research.
• Confidentiality and privacy — participants' data must be kept confidential and their identities protected (e.g. by anonymising or using numbers rather than names); researchers must not invade privacy by observing people where they would not expect to be studied.

The principle of Respect is, in a sense, the ethical heart of research with human beings, because it insists that participants are persons with rights, not merely a source of data. Informed consent operationalises this by requiring that people choose to take part with adequate knowledge of what they are agreeing to — it treats them as autonomous agents rather than objects to be used. The right to withdraw extends the same autonomy through the study and beyond it: a person who consents is not thereby committed, and can leave, and remove their data, at any point. Confidentiality and privacy protect participants from harm that could follow disclosure — embarrassment, stigma, or worse — and from being studied in contexts where they had a reasonable expectation of not being observed. Each of these is a specific, examinable issue, and a strong answer names the exact issue at stake rather than gesturing vaguely at "ethics": if participants were not told the study's true nature, the issue is informed consent (and possibly deception); if they were pressured to continue, it is the right to withdraw; if their identities could be exposed, it is confidentiality.

Competence

Competence requires psychologists to maintain high standards and to work only within the limits of their training and expertise. A researcher should not undertake procedures (e.g. clinical assessments) they are not qualified to perform, and should seek supervision or refer on where a study strays beyond their competence. Competence is the principle most often overlooked by students, perhaps because it concerns the researcher's qualifications rather than the participant's treatment, but it matters because incompetent research can itself cause harm — a badly-administered clinical interview might distress a vulnerable participant, or an unqualified researcher might misinterpret results with real consequences. The principle obliges psychologists to recognise the boundaries of their expertise, to keep their knowledge and skills current, and to refer on or seek supervision when a study demands competencies they lack. It is the ethical counterpart of the scientific requirement for rigour: research must be conducted well, by people equipped to conduct it, and not merely with good intentions.

Responsibility

Responsibility requires researchers to avoid harming participants and to act in their best interests. Its key issues are:

• Protection from harm — participants should not be exposed to risk of physical or psychological harm greater than they would encounter in ordinary life. If distress arises, the study should be stopped and support offered. "Harm" here is broad: it covers physical harm, but in psychology the more common risk is psychological harm — distress, embarrassment, loss of self-esteem, or lasting anxiety. The "everyday life" benchmark is the standard: a study may not put participants at greater risk than they would ordinarily face, which is why studies inducing significant stress or deception about threatening situations are ethically fraught. Crucially, protection is an active, ongoing duty — the researcher must monitor participants during the study and be willing to halt it if harm emerges, not merely assess risk beforehand.
• Debriefing — after the study, participants must be fully informed of its true aims and nature, given the chance to ask questions and withdraw their data, and returned to the psychological state in which they arrived. Debriefing is especially important where deception was used, and is the primary way researchers discharge their responsibility after a study that could not use full prior consent.

Responsibility is the principle that obliges the researcher to safeguard participants' welfare, and its two issues work together across the arc of a study. Protection from harm is largely a before and during concern: the researcher must design the study so that participants face no greater risk than everyday life, monitor for distress as it runs, and be prepared to stop if harm arises. Debriefing is the after concern: it repairs, as far as possible, any temporary deception or distress by revealing the true aims, answering questions, restoring participants to their prior state, and — importantly — offering the chance to withdraw their data now that they know what the study was really about. Debriefing carries particular weight in studies that used deception or could not obtain full prior consent, because it is the mechanism by which the researcher belatedly gives participants the understanding they were denied at the outset, and the opportunity to opt out retrospectively. A well-run debrief can make an otherwise ethically-borderline study defensible; its absence is a serious failing. Note, though, that a debrief cannot undo harm already suffered — it mitigates rather than erases — which is why protection from harm and debriefing are complementary rather than interchangeable.

Integrity

Integrity requires honesty, accuracy and fairness. Beyond the treatment of participants, it also governs the conduct of science itself: researchers must report their methods and findings honestly, must not fabricate or falsify data, and must acknowledge the work of others. Scientific fraud — inventing results, or selectively reporting only the data that support a hypothesis — is a grave breach of integrity that corrupts the shared body of knowledge and can mislead policy and practice for years, which is why honesty in reporting is as much an ethical duty as fair treatment of participants. Its central issue in the research-methods context, and the one most often examined, is:

• Deception — participants should not be deliberately misled or have information withheld, because deception undermines informed consent. Some deception is sometimes judged acceptable if it is mild, unavoidable for the study's validity, does not cause distress, and is fully corrected at debriefing. But deception that could cause harm or that participants would object to is not acceptable. (Piliavin's field study, for example, could not tell subway passengers it was staged — a form of deception justified by the impossibility of studying spontaneous helping otherwise.)

Deception is the most contested ethical issue in psychology because it sits in genuine tension with good science. Many important studies would be impossible if participants knew their true purpose — a study of obedience, conformity or helping would be worthless if participants realised what was being measured, because they would alter their behaviour (the demand-characteristics problem of Lesson 8). Researchers therefore sometimes argue that mild deception is a necessary price for valid data. But deception is not a free pass: it undermines informed consent (you cannot fully consent to something you have been misled about), and where it causes real distress — as critics argue Milgram's did — it becomes hard to defend regardless of the scientific payoff. The BPS position is that deception should be minimised, used only when no alternative exists, restricted to cases where participants are unlikely to object and no significant harm results, and always corrected at debriefing. This is precisely the kind of judgement a cost–benefit analysis is meant to inform, and it explains why deception cannot be evaluated in the abstract — it depends on how mild it is, whether it was avoidable, whether it caused harm, and how well it was remedied.

Principle	Key ethical issues	Typical management
Respect	Informed consent, right to withdraw, confidentiality	Consent forms; freedom to leave; anonymisation
Competence	Working within expertise	Supervision; referral
Responsibility	Protection from harm, debrief	Monitoring distress; full debrief
Integrity	Deception	Minimise; justify; correct at debrief

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Managing Ethical Issues

Researchers use a repertoire of techniques to manage the issues above, and the exam frequently asks how a researcher could "deal with" the ethical issues in a described study — a task that rewards matching a specific remedy to a specific issue rather than reciting the whole toolkit: