THE HUMAN SUBJECT IN PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH

One important aspect of research in psychology is the nature of the person who supplies most of our data: the human subject. Recent empirical and theoretical literature on the human subject provides sobering and alarming implications for the future of research in psychology. This paper critically examines the human subject in terms of his changing role and status in the history of psychology, his role in contemporary psychology, the limitations and weaknesses of his present status, and what might be done to remedy the situation. The discussion covers the bias in subject selection, the subject as he enters the laboratory, his performance in the experimental task, and ethical implications of certain kinds of tasks he performs. It is suggested that psychology's image of the human subject as a stimulus-response machine is incorrect and that many of our studies are based on data supplied to us by subjects who are neither randomly selected or assigned, nor representative of the general adult population, nor naive, and who are suspicious and distrustful of psychological researchers. (Author)