ETHICAL ISSUES

Purposes of Personality Testing

According to one wide-ranging survey, the validity of well-developed psychological tests is comparable to that of the most widely used medical tests (Meyer et al., 2001). Still, a further question must be considered: How will test scores be used? The answer has practical and ethical implications (Hanson, 1993).

The most obvious uses for personality tests are those to which they are put by the professional personality testers—the ones who set up the booths at APA conventions—and their customers. The customers are typically organizations such as schools, clinics, corporations, or government agencies that wish to know something about the people they encounter. Sometimes this information is desired so that, regardless of the score obtained, the person who is measured can be helped. For example, schools frequently use tests to measure vocational interests to help their students choose careers. A clinician might administer a test to get an indication of how serious a client’s problem is, or to suggest a therapeutic direction.

Sometimes, testing is for the benefit of the tester, not necessarily the person being tested. An employer may test an individual’s “integrity” to find out whether he is trustworthy enough to be hired (or even to be retained), or may test to find out about other personality traits deemed relevant to future job performance. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) routinely uses personality testing when selecting its agents (D. Waller, 1993).

Reasonable arguments can be made for or against any of these uses. By telling people what kind of occupational group they most resemble, vocational-interest tests provide potentially valuable information to individuals who may not know what they want to do (D. B. Schmidt, Lubinski, & Benbow, 1998). On the other hand, the use of these tests rests on the implicit theory that any given occupation should continue to be populated by individuals like those already in it. For example, if your response profile resembles those obtained from successful mechanics or jet pilots, then perhaps you should consider being a mechanic or a jet pilot. Although this approach seems reasonable, it also could keep occupational fields from evolving and prevent certain individuals (such as women or members of minority groups) from joining fields from which they traditionally have been excluded. For example, an ordinarily socialized American woman may have outlooks or responses that are very different from those of the typical garage mechanic or jet pilot. Does this mean that women should never become mechanics or pilots?

A more general class of objections is aimed at the wide array of personality tests used by many large organizations, including the CIA, major automobile manufacturers, phone companies, and the military. According to one critic, almost any kind of testing can be objected to on two grounds. First, tests are unfair mechanisms through which institutions can control individuals—by rewarding those with the institutionally determined “correct” traits (such as high “conscientiousness”) and punishing those with the “wrong” traits (such as low “conscientiousness”). Second, perhaps traits such as “conscientiousness” or even “intelligence” do not matter until and unless they are tested, and in that sense they are invented or “constructed” by the tests themselves (Hanson, 1993). Underlying these two objections seems to be a more general sense, which I think many people share, that there is something undignified or even degrading about submitting oneself to a test and having one’s personality described by a set of scores.

All of these objections make sense. Personality tests—along with other kinds of tests such as those measuring intelligence and honesty—and even drug tests do function as a part of society’s mechanism for controlling people, by rewarding the “right” kind (those who are intelligent, honest, and don’t do drugs) and punishing the “wrong” kind. During the 1930s and 1940s some employers used personality tests to try to screen out job applicants inclined to be pro-union (Zickar, 2001). Does this seem ethical to you?

Still, criticisms that view personality testing as undignified or unethical, when considered, appear rather naïve. These criticisms seem to object to the idea of determining the degree to which somebody is conscientious, or intelligent, or sociable, and then using that determination as the basis of an important decision (such as employment). But if you accept the fact that an employer is not obligated to hire randomly anybody who walks through the door, and that the employer tries to use good sense in deciding who would be the best person to hire (If you were an employer, wouldn’t you do that?), then you also must accept that applicants’ traits like “conscientiousness,” “intelligence,” and “sociability” are going to be judged. The only real question is how. One common alternative is for the employer to talk with the prospective employee and try to gauge his conscientiousness by how well his shoes are shined, or his haircut, or some other such clue (Highhouse, 2008). Is this an improvement?

You may argue that you would rather be judged by a person than by a computer scanning a form, regardless of the demonstrated invalidity of the former and validity of the latter (Ones, Viswesvaran, & Schmidt, 1993). Although that is a reasonable position, it is important to be clear about the choice being made. One cannot choose for personality never to be judged—judgments will happen even if all of the tests are burned tomorrow. The only real choice is this: How would you prefer to have your personality judged?

As we have seen, the use of personality tests in applied settings raises some important and complex ethical issues. But the ethical issues confronting psychology go beyond personality testing.

Protection of Research Participants

Whenever research involves humans, psychologists (or other researchers, such as medical scientists) need to be concerned about the consequences of what they are doing. Will the research harm the participants? The well-known studies of obedience by Stanley Milgram (1975), in which participants were ordered to give painful shocks to a screaming victim (who was really an unharmed research assistant) would probably not be allowed today by the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) that must approve almost all research done by university scientists. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine a modern IRB that would approve the famous study that set up a mock (but realistic) prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, in which participants assigned to be guards mentally and even physically abused the ones assigned to be prisoners (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973).

IRBs are also wary of studies that deceive or (let’s call it what it is) lie to participants. Quite frequently, psychologists tell their research participants something that is not true.²³ The purpose of such deception usually is to make the research realistic. A participant might be told—falsely—that a test she is taking is a valid measure of IQ or personality, for example. Then the experimenter can assess the participant’s reaction when she receives a poor score. Or a participant might be told that another person was described by a “trained psychologist” as both “friendly” and “unsociable” to see how the participant resolves this type of inconsistency. The most common deceptive practice is probably the cover story, in which participants are misinformed about the topic of the study. For example, they might be told the study is examining perceptual acuity, when the actual purpose is to see how long participants are willing to persist at a boring task.

Even today, this kind of deception is allowed by the principles of the American Psychological Association, and by most IRBs, though extra justification for why it’s necessary is frequently required. Still, the ethics of deception in research have long been controversial (see, e.g., Baumrind, 1985; Smith & Richardson, 1983) and are not completely settled even now. Fortunately, I suppose, the use of deception is rare in personality research, much of which involves correlation personality measures with behavioral and life outcomes; deception is much more common in the neighboring field of social psychology, but seems less common than it used to be even there.

While deceiving participants may be less of an issue than it was in the past, another is becoming more important: privacy. In particular, the experience-sampling methods that gather real-world B data, described in Chapter 2, offer the possibility of violating the privacy of the people who are participants in the studies, or even bystanders who never agreed to participate. For example, if a participant carries the EAR device or wears a lapel camera all day, the recorded sounds and images not only reveal her own behavior, but also provide information about what other people in the participant’s vicinity said and did. The ethical and legal complications are numerous (Robbins, 2017) and some guidelines for using these new methods are beginning to emerge. These include never publishing verbatim quotes that could identify the participant or any other individual, getting consent from everybody who ends up getting recorded (not just the initial participant), and removing all identifying information, such as names, from data files as soon as possible. This is a good start, but privacy issues are bound to become an even more pressing concern as research begins to exploit data available from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and whatever gets invented next.

The Uses of Psychological Research

A different kind of ethical concern is that psychological research, however it is conducted, might be used for harmful purposes. Just as physicists who develop atomic bombs should worry about what their inventions can do, so too should psychologists be aware of the consequences of what their work might enable.

Who decides what behaviors to create and whose behavior should be controlled?

For example, one field of psychology—behaviorism—has long aimed to develop a technology to control behavior (see Chapter 15). The technology is not yet fully developed, but if it ever is, it will raise deep questions about who decides what behaviors to create and whose behavior should be controlled. The main figure in behaviorism, B. F. Skinner, wrote extensively about these issues (Skinner, 1948, 1971).

Yet another issue arises when psychologists choose to study racial differences and sex differences. Putting aside whatever purely scientific merits this work might have, it raises a fundamental question about whether its findings are likely to do more harm than good. If some racial group really is lower in intelligence, or if men really are better (or worse) at math than women, are we sure we want to know? The arguments in favor of exploring these issues are that science should study everything, and (on a more applied level) that knowing the basic abilities of a group might help in tailoring educational programs specifically to the needs of its members. The arguments against this research are that such findings are bound to be misused by racists and sexists, and therefore can become tools of oppression themselves, and that knowledge of group characteristics is not really very useful for tailoring programs to individual needs.

When the question is whether or not to study a given topic, psychologists, like other scientists, almost always come down on the side of “yes.” After all, ignorance never got anybody very far. Still, there are an infinite number of unanswered questions out there that one could usefully investigate. When a psychologist devotes research time trying to prove that one race is smarter than another, or that one gender is superior to the other in some respect, it is hard not to wish that the researcher had found some other topic equally interesting.

Honesty and Open Science

Honesty is another ethical issue common to all research. The past few years have seen a number of scandals in physics, medicine, and psychology in which researchers fabricated their data; the most spectacular case in psychology involved the Dutch researcher Diederik Stapel, mentioned earlier. Lies cause difficulty in all sectors of life, but they are particularly worrisome in research because science is based on truth and trust. Scientific lies, when they happen, undermine the very foundation of the field. If I report about some data that I have found, you might disagree with my interpretation—that is fine, and in science this happens all the time. Working through disagreements about what data mean is an essential scientific activity. But if you cannot be sure that I really even found the data I report, then there is nothing for us to talk about. Even scientists who vehemently disagree on fundamental issues generally take each other’s honesty for granted (contrast this with the situation in politics). If they cannot, then science stops dead in its tracks.

In scientific research, complete honesty is more than simply not faking one’s data. A lesson that emerged from the controversies about replication, discussed earlier, is that many problems arise when the reporting of data is incomplete, as opposed to false. For example, it has been a not-uncommon practice for researchers to simply not report studies that didn’t “work,” i.e., that did not obtain the expected or hoped-for result. And, because of publication bias, few journals are willing to publish negative results in any case. The study failed, the reasoning goes, which means something must have gone wrong. So why would anybody want to hear about it? While this reasoning makes a certain amount of sense, it is also dangerous, because reporting only the studies that work can lead to a misleading picture overall. If 50 attempts to find precognition fail, for example, and one succeeds, then reporting the single success could make it possible to believe that people can see into the future!

A related problem arises when a researcher does not report results concerning all the experimental conditions, variables, or methods in a study. Again, the not-unreasonable tendency is only to report the ones that seem most meaningful, and omit aspects of the study that seem uninformative or confusing. In a more subtle kind of publication bias, reviewers and editors of journals might even encourage authors to focus their reports only on the most “interesting” analyses. But also again, a misleading picture can emerge if a reader of the research does not know what methods were tried or variables were measured that did not yield meaningful results. In short, there is so much flexibility in the ways a typical psychology study can be analyzed that it’s easy—much too easy—for researchers to inadvertently “p-hack,” which, as mentioned earlier, means that they keep analyzing their data in different ways until they get the statistically significant result that they need (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011).

The emerging remedy for these problems is a movement towards what is becoming known as open science, a set of practices intended to move research closer to the ideals on which science was founded. These practices include fully describing all aspects of all studies, reporting studies that failed as well as those that succeeded, and freely sharing data with other scientists. An institute called the “Center for Open Science” has become the headquarters for many efforts in this direction, offering internet resources for sharing information. At the same time, major scientific organizations such as the American Psychological Association are establishing new guidelines for full disclosure of data and analyses (Appelbaum et al., 2018), and there is even a new organization, the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) devoted exclusively to promoting these goals.