Newsletter

April 2002

IRBS: Ethics, Yes-Epistemology, No

John Furedy

Christine Hansen’s paean to the increased
current role of institutional review boards (IRBs) [“Regulatory Changes
Affecting IRBs and Researchers,” September 2001] contains a number of questionable
assertions, but what struck me as particularly unsound was the view that,
as long as they were “diverse” enough, IRBs could validly determine what
constitutes “poorly designed research.” This view may have some plausibility
for medical drug-evaluation research on humans, which is not really basic
research at all, but rather applied evaluations of treatments that have
been discovered through basic scientific research. However, it does not
apply to most studies conducted by members of APS, studies that deal with
scientific, psychological basic research issues. For such psychological
research, IRBs are capable only of evaluating the ethical issues of how
the subjects are treated, and not epistemological issues such as how well
designed the study is. To take my own MA and PhD research as an example,
during the period of 1963-4 at Sydney University, I administered electric
shocks to several hundred human subjects. Had an IRB existed at that time
and place, it would have been competent to decide whether the strongest
shock I used (2.5 mA) met ethical requirements. Indeed, I would go further
and say that these sorts of ethical checks are continuously required, because
otherwise researchers like me may be tempted to go beyond ethical limits
to increase the statistical power of what are usually frustratingly weak
experimental manipulations in human experimental psychology.

But I assert with considerable confidence
that no IRB would have been competent to assess the adequacy of my experimental
design, which was intended to determine the locus of reinforcement in human
autonomic classical aversive and appetitive conditioning. The only individuals
who had the slightest chance of epistemologically evaluating my experimental
design were the referees of my papers on this subject, the titles of which
were: “Reinforcement Through UCS Offset in Classical Conditioning,” “Aspects
of Reinforcement Through UCS Offset in Classical Aversive Conditioning,”
And “Classical Appetitive Conditioning of the GSR with Cool Air as UCS,
and the Roles of UCS Onset and Offset as Reinforcers of the CR” (1965,
1967, and 1967, respectively; see my cv on my web-site, www.psych.utoronto.ca/~furedy).
Even some of those knowledgeable and expert referees, in my view, totally
misunderstood what I was investigating and hence were wrong about the soundness
of my experimental design. For example, a number of them could not understand
how I could talk about reinforcement in an experimental preparation that
involved classical rather than instrumental or operant conditioning.

At least for the typical psychological
basic research studies conducted by members of APS, let us not follow inapplicable
analogies based on medical treatment-evaluation research, but rather let
us restrict the ethical issues of treatment to IRBs, and leave the epistemological
task of evaluating the soundness of a psychological study’s design to grant
proposal-evaluating committees and to editors of our high-quality journals.
They are not infallible, but at least they have in principle the requisite
background for what is an epistemological rather than ethical evaluative
task.

Letter in American
Psychological Society Observer, February 2002 issue.