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One issue that comes to mind when conducting research studies and the ethical implication is, does this study help or hinder the study group? I once read somewhere that it is unethical and morally incorrect to conduct a study on subjects from which they do not or would not benefit. For example, if a researcher wanted to know how many volts a human can endure before resulting in serious injury, it would be ethically and morally wrong to conduct this on other humans (or any other animal for that matter). However, since the study group would be enduring pain, grief, and agony without gaining anything, it wouldn’t be proper to continue with this study. On that note, knowing the voltage that an average human can endure is significant so the best way to gather this data is to ask if anyone has ever had an experience with electrical shocks and then backpaddling to what the voltage might have been. This example was just an extreme example of an ethical dilemma within research.

An Institutional Review Board (IRB), is also known as an ethical review board. It is seated by at least one scientist and one member whose primary focus is nonscientific (American Psychological Association, 2022). There must also be someone who is not otherwise affiliated with the company (American Psychological Association, 2022). This allows the committee to be unbiased when it comes to selecting, reviewing, conducting, and analyzing research data.