You and your fellow group members are now the institutional review board at Michigan.  Discuss the following research proposals and answer the following questions for each one: 1) what ethical issues does the proposal bring up and 2) would you approve it, approve it pending specific modifications, or reject it, and why?

1.  A researcher wants to investigate variables related to dating preferences.  He wants to place several "men seeking women" personal ads in a local paper that differ in their description of the man supposedly looking for dates.  He will count the number of voice mail messages that ad elicits, and he will also analyze the content of these messages.  No calls will be returned, however, no dates will be set up, and the women who respond will never know that the ad was phony.
 
 

2.  A researcher wants to examine the effects of social feedback on womenís eating behavior.  Women will be brought into the lab and given a creativity test.  At random, half of the women will be selected for positive feedback ("You scored in 90th percentile-- you're a very creative person") and half will receive negative feedback ("You scored in the 10th percentile-- you're not a very creative person.").  Then, in what will be portrayed as an unrelated consumer decision task, participants will be asked to sample several different cookies and rate them on a variety of dimensions.  In reality, the experimenter will be measuring how much of each cookie the women eat.  A complete debriefing session will follow the experiment.
 
 

3.   A researcher is interested in how people respond to racist remarks.  Participants of different races enter the lab and are told they will be "chatting" with three other students using computers.  They are told to discuss issues related to being freshmen in college.  In reality, comments made by the other "people" are pre-programmed into the computer.  In some conditions, one of the other "people" repeatedly makes racially insensitive remarks, some of which include offensive language directed towards the race of the participants.  Participants are then asked to rate their impressions of their fellow "chatters."
 
 
 

4.  A researcher interested in sexual behavior wants to videotape the entrance to a known house of prostitution.  She will use the tape to analyze the nonverbal behavior of men who decide to enter these places, as well as to determine the demographics of the typical patron of such establishments.

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