Ethics Critique of
Boyatzis, Matillo and Nesbitt (1995).
I usually begin my units on Ethics with an exercise in coming up with studies designed to test whether watching violent TV increases aggression in children.
We begin by deciding that an experimental design in which children are randomly assigned to either the violent TV condition or the non-violent TV condition is critical in the study.
We then recall that such a study was done in the famous Bobo doll experiment by Alfred Bandura (check out your Psych 1 notes if you have forgotten).
BUT, we quickly decide that we don’t really care if children become aggressive toward a punching bag, but that we really care about children’s aggression with each other. So we decide to do a study in which we expose some children to violent programming and some to non-violent and then watch their behavior on the playground. Right? Wrong!!
Why is it wrong? Because, I always argue, it is unethical to create aggression in any child both for the aggressive child and the child who is receiving those acts of aggression.
So, imagine my surprise when I ran across the Power Ranger study that came up in our library assignment. I was dumbfounded!
What do you do then? Well, this is a great lesson in how science is a living organism and not a bunch of dead papers. I e-mailed Chris Boyatsis who is now at Bucknell University.
Dear Dr. Boyatzis:
I wonder if I could ask you to search back a
few years. I am teaching our Research Methods class this year and thought
your 1995 Mighty Morphin Power Rangers paper would be an excellent springboard
for discussion as the students in this cohort could easily have been those
karate kicking children you were studying back then.
My question is about the human subjects protections
that you used in the study. I would appreciate anything you can tell me
about the informed consent and debriefing processes that you used. I also
wonder whether you had any feedback from parents after the study was conducted.
Thanks very much. I appreciate your help.
Doreen Arcus, Ph.D.
University of Massachusetts Lowell
And here is his reply, reprinted here with permission, emphases added:
Hi Doreen,
It amazes me how much the interest in this Power Rangers study
continues...
I appreciate your questions. And I am going back quite a few years,
and I don't have handy the materials, like consent forms on this, because that
study was done over 11 years ago and at another university on the other side of
the country. But I think I have this right: We went through the
usual procedures for review, and at the level of the parents' consent, the
letter described the basic design with terms something like "your child
may be assigned to the group that will watch an episode of the show...your child
will then be observed during regular free play with
classmates...." In all honesty, I'm not certain what we said
about assuaging any concerns about the potential negative impact on the kids'
behavior. I imagine we said something along the lines of what
researchers on this topic usually say--that "children in the Power Rangers
condition would be watching a show that they could usually watch at home (and
in the case of that show, every day of the week) and that is the most popular
children's show on TV." I am sure we told parents to
contact us with any concerns about their children's behavior following the
study. As for debriefing, I think we sent a summary of the study to the
school and parents. I don't think we did anything unusually supportive or
protective of the kids, in large part because of the ubiquity of the particular
show.
Let me go beyond the information here and offer a postscript, 11 years after
the fact.
As I look at the rationale that we probably used in that consent, and the rationale
used in this line of research, I feel some qualms of guilt. Our
justification that "kids watch this show all the time" is not fully
morally defensible, is it (after all, at home kids get spanked all the time,
too, but we can't spank them in a research study)? But AT THE TIME,
we did not have any empirical evidence of the show's effects, so it was worth
learning about.
(Another postscript on this: early in grad school my advisor and I wanted
to do a study on the effects of anxiety on kids' play and fantasy, and we
wanted to create different anxiety conditions. We decided on showing kids
(like 4-6 yr olds) the clip from Wizard of Oz where the flying monkeys come
down and kidnap Dorothy and her pals. The university rejected it, saying it
would be too anxiety-provoking for young children, and in response to our point
that this movie is widely watched by children the school said that doesn't
justify scaring the kids some more with it.)
Back to the Power Rangers, thanks to that one small study we learned that
some kids (boys, especially) were distinctly more aggressive after watching it
than a control group. There are problems with the design, some serious
shortcomings that I teach my own undergrads to detect and rectify. But it
was a little study that made a huge splash due to its topic (Power Rangers,
which was the #1 rated shows for kids 2-11 yrs old for 102 consecutive weeks!)
and the findings (it seemed to make boys more aggressive). The media
response was deafening, and my "15 minutes of fame" spanned a year
and a half. Interviews with media of all sorts around the world, my
colleagues getting sick and tired of seeing news crews with lights and cameras
coming to my office, and most prominently segments in 1994 on the prime-time shows
Entertainment Tonight and 20/20, a carefully-timed spot just 10 days before
Christmas.
That media experience is a story in itself, primarily in the use and abuse of
psychological information by media. But to tell another part of the story
is to link research with public policy affecting children. It's worth
noting that on that 20/20 segment, in his interview of me (ABC flew me out from
CA to NYC), John Stossel took his usual condescending tone and seemed to mock
the idea that there should be any limits on kids' TV--if you don't like
it, turn it off (this reflected what we'd learn in later years his overly
libertarian values). I recall him asking me incredulously if there
should be the equivalent of a "Dept of Motor Vehicles" for kids' TV that
would police programs, or that would give ratings on them. He said this
in a most dismissive tone, and although I emphasized I was there to discuss the
research and not policy, I said that perhaps it wasn't unreasonable that the
government might want to take steps such as rating shows, etc.
Jump ahead a bit...Clinton passed Federal TeleCommunications Act of 1996 that
included many mandates regarding children's TV, one the installation of V-chip
technology and also the use of ratings of children's TV shows.
I don't think for a moment that my one study or interview caused any of
this legislation but I do feel that that one little Power Rangers study and its
media coverage helped spark, and contribute to, broader public and political
debate about the bigger picture of kids' TV, and that latest wave of
public concern (we've had many such waves about kids' TV) well could have
contributed to the telecommunications act policies and some new thinking about
kids' TV.
Much more than you asked for, but it is a fascinating story, one that adults
and students tend to be intrigued by. If you want any more of my take on
this, don't hesitate to ask.
Chris Boyatzis
So, would today’s IRB have approved this study? Not the one I sit on. I think the researcher’s qualms in retrospect are right on target. Notice that there was not an intent to cause harm, but was it reasonably expected? It was the hypothesis! So, IRB review is not a perfect process, but it is the best we have. What would you suggest they do to counteract any of the harm they might have created? The good was probably a contribution to society, but there is a continuing obligation to the participants themselves. Some kind of program to decrease aggression would be a start.
By the way, that was the beginning of a lovely correspondence. Lesson: Don’t hesitate to contact researchers. They are real people too!