IB Course Entry, Psychology: Ethics or Experiments?

I take IB Psychology. In the beginning of the IB Psychology course, all students are taught "Research Methods," the correct and accurate way of conducting a psychological experiment. We learned how to use repeated measures, repeated trials, ways to avoid expectation biases, and so fourth. Then we went into the issue of ethics. 

Ethics. It sort of doesn't make sense. There is a rule in psychology, that participants should not be deceived, harmed in any sort, that they aren't required to take an experiment, that they must be debriefed about the experiment, confidentiality of the participant, and etc. However, if the experiment breaks some codes of ethics but yields a very precious discovery, then the experiment is acceptable. This is because the results of the experiment are worth more than the hurt done to the participants.

This concept is similar to the “Ends and Means” ethics presentation from class. If the results of an questionable action are very good, then the results will justify the consequences. A famous psychological study of ethics is the one by Milgram (1961). Milgram’s study tested normal people on their obedience to authority. He deceived participants into thinking they were harming, and even killing a victim with an electric switch. The results showed that people were willing to follow authority, even to someone else’s great harm. It is still debated by many whether the findings of this experiment were ethical, and it started a whole revolution about ethical means in an experiment. 

In a more recent study I read, cats were used to test brain connections with vision. The experimenters covered one eye of multiple cats since they were born, and uncovered them only until they were close to maturing. The experimenters found that the eye that was covered was blind, because connections were not made during a special period in the cats’ maturation. I was very sad when I heard that the cats were blinded. I wasn’t exactly sure if the psychologists had done the right thing, even for the sake of study. I think there should be a better balance between ethics and the need for data.