ABSTRACT
Over the past two or three decades, disquiet about the standard of ethics in social research has been chiefly occasioned by a few projects which achieved notoriety. Some of these involved allegations of straight fraud: Sir Cyril Burt, for example, doyen of the psychological profession, stood accused of inventing not only experimental material but also research collaborators in his anxiety to bolster his preconceived notions about the nature of human intelligence (Hearnshaw, 1979). Others were community studies in which the identities of localities or individuals turned out to have been insufficiently concealed (Vidich and Bensman, 1958). Another category consists of deceitfully constructed psychological experiments: Milgram (1974), for example, conned volunteers into administering so-called ‘electric shocks’ to subjects who failed to comply with the instructions of a scientist impresario. In a fourth group of cases, the problems were ones of sponsorship: Project Camelot, concerned with charting the propensity for internal conflict’ in a number of Latin American countries, had to be called off when the involvement of the United States Army and Defence Department became known.
