The British Psychological Society (BPS) governs ethical guidelines to ensure the safe guard of participants during experiments. The primary goal is to protect participants from physical or mental harm. By gaining informed consent, ensuring confidentiality, refraining from any form of deception and fully debriefing participants, reduces any possible harm that could have arisen. For a more detailed look at each stage, see: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/ethics/bps-conduct.pdf. Children
The electric shock experiment by Milgram (1963) raised many questions about if or if not ethical guidelines had been breached. The participants showed visible signs of distress during the experiment therefore questioning how protected they were. However after the experiment, 85% said they were glad to have been a part of the study as they learnt something about themselves. This suggests as long as there is a good quality debrief, any psychological harm or deception that participants endure can be overcome. Similarly ensuring the participants realise the positive motives of the study, it could be argued the ends then justify the means; the gain in scientific knowledge is worth the risk of harm caused during the experiment. In Milgram’s experiment, the gain in knowledge was that everyone is capable of harming others. Society isn’t divided into evil and good people, but we are all the same.
It is very subjective to say the outcome justifies any harm caused during the experiment. However as long as participants know they can withdraw from the study at any time and that they will be thoroughly debriefed afterwards- adults know it is their choice whether or not to continue with the experiment. Adults have a voice, children don’t. Informed consent for under 16’s is given by the parent or guardian. In the case of Little Albert (Watson, 1920) he shows visible signs of distress once conditioned to fear rats. He tries to crawl away but Watson ensures the rat follows him. This is an extreme example, but shows how sometimes it is debatable whether the guarantors actually have their child’s best interests at heart.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FKZAYt77ZM This is a video of Watson’s experiment.
Is it really acceptable to manipulate a child’s distress? The end result cannot justify causing harm to an innocent baby because they do understand it is an experiment nor can they be debriefed. Researchers do not know the lasting effects of causing such distress, no matter how great or small, in a child.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTsewNrHUHU This is a video of The Strange Situation.
Adults have a voice to tell the experimenter they want to stop. Children don’t. Adults can understand the Debrief; they know why the experiment was conducted. Children don’t. There is enough child abuse and upset in the world without experiments purposefully manipulating innocent children’s emotions as well.
sarric 
I believe that it is much more difficult to define ethical guidelines for children than for adults due to the difficulties in communication that arise. Since children are often not fully aware of what’s going on in a study is it really ok to experiment on them – even if we debriefed them could we really be sure that they understood what we had done?
But at the moment experiments on children can be vital, especially in educational research where we need to find better ways to teach children so that they can learn in the best manner possible, essentially setting them up psychologically for life.
In the end I believe that we must decide ourselves whether the risks to children outweigh the benefits, abd decide whether it is really worth carrying out a study that causes harm, deception, ect.
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I am in full agreement with you that children have no voice, with the experiment conducted on little Albert, it was a different era, children were seen and not heard, ethics were not around to protect any participant whether adult or child. But the need today for researchers to understand development in children is massive compared to the 1920’s. It would be nice to think that we have more respect for a child today in that we try and listen to them, to gain our understanding, so the need to conduct such harsh experiments on them is not justified. We were all children once would we have liked to have been experimented on like that? Unfortunately experimentation on children still goes on today, they do not give consent for these experiments to take place, neither do the childs parents or guardians
This is a story about a young 10 year old girl Candace Newmaker, who was murdered by her therapist, while under treatment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZg1IYoxvNo&feature=related
What the world needs is kids like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQmz6Rbpnu0&feature=related this young girl certainly knows how to be heard, we need more kids like this. Then maybe they wouldn’t be subjected to research that could harm them.
I agree with you children are not able to understand main reason of many things. And because of their potential understanding they obey the person who is older themselves. In this case using children in Milgram’s is not ethical for me. Not just for the Milgram study, many other researches should protect children’s rights much more than adults. They are easy to abuse comparing to adults. Altough their parents allow them to particapate to a study ethical concerns should be much more careful about that