Trust
Most students enter the psychological research setting with some level of trust in the experimenter. After all, isn’t this person a Psychologist (or at least a budding one)? Shouldn’t they be sensitive to such things as feelings and emotions? Please don’t disappoint students’ expectations. Even if your study is about serial memory schemata, you are dealing with real people. Be sensitive to their needs and concerns.
Courtesy
Please treat subjects with the same courtesy you would expect. Participants are helping you with your research projects and deserve your gratitude. If you treat them without proper respect, not only might your data be contaminated, but also you may have discouraged someone from choosing a career in Psychology.
Privacy
Subjects in research have every right to expect that their information will be kept confidential. This means that you cannot talk about individual subjects with your colleagues in such a manner that you identify them. Please make sure that papers and databases with sensitive information from your research are kept in secure places (like locked rooms and a password-protected device) so that no one could accidentally discover a subject’s identity.
Informed Consent
Informed consent of participants is a central criterion for conducting ethical research. Subjects must know enough about your study so that they can make an informed decision about whether they want to participate or not. All research must comply with the St. Olaf IRB guidelines, which lays out the criteria for gaining and documenting informed consent.
Educational Debriefing
You will also need to compose a written explanation of your study, which you will give to subjects upon completion of their participation. This educational debriefing statement must explain the study to the participant in a way that is engaging, understandable, and reasonably comprehensive. Most statements will be about one single spaced page of text and will contain some suggestions for further reading (at the general interest level, not just journal articles).