Reforming University Ethics Boards

A Post-Woke Vision for Ethics Review in the Human Sciences

A guest post by Chloe Ward and Lawrence Patihis

University ethics boards in the social sciences play an important and constructive role in research governance. They promote awareness of potential risks, require thorough consideration of research designs and procedures, verify that investigators possess the necessary competence and demand adherence to important privacy measures. These functions support rigorous, responsible scholarship and protect participants from genuine, avoidable harm.

Research ethics boards, known as Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in the US, emerged in the mid-20th century in response to egregious abuses in human experimentation. The foundational Nuremberg Code of 1947 established voluntary informed consent following the post-WWII trials of Nazi physicians. The World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki (1964) expanded these principles and called for independent ethical review. Early US committees appeared in the 1950s at the NIH Clinical Center and via 1966 Public Health Service policies. Public revelation of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in 1972 prompted the National Research Act of 1974 and the Belmont Report of 1979, which articulated the core principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice, leading to mandatory federal regulations requiring IRBs. In terms of psychology, legitimate concerns about the Stanford Prison Experiment or Milgram’s obedience experiments helped form the modern ethics board. All of these twentieth century developments appear positive.

In recent years, however, a distinct shift has occurred in how many ethics committees operate within universities. Their decision-making has increasingly aligned with the patterns of ideological bias documented in the work of Lee Jussim, Nathan Honeycutt and colleagues, namely the dominance of left wing and social justice ideologies. This is important because ethics review processes themselves receive relatively little public scrutiny, yet they exert substantial influence over what research is permitted and how it is conducted. Because a large majority of academics within social sciences identify as left-wing (e.g. Honeycutt & Jussim, 2020; Inbar & Lammers, 2012), committees composed predominantly of such reviewers are prone to systematic bias, whether deliberate or inadvertent. This is particularly relevant for applications that may touch on politically or ideologically sensitive subjects but also may affect applications more broadly via the principles and procedures considered ethical from that particular ideological stance.

While the critical social justice movement may contain well-intentioned elements, serious problems arise when its assumptions become the default lens through which ethics boards evaluate research. These assumptions often manifest as illiberalism, an exaggerated view of participants as fragile, and an overriding emphasis on harm avoidance at the expense of other ethical goods. The sections below outline these problems and articulate a more constructive alternative for each.

Illiberalism in Ethics Review

The Problem

Ethics committees are increasingly applying principles that are rigid and rooted in left-wing ideological commitments, frequently reinforced by guidance from bodies such as the American Psychological Association. These principles are presented as neutral professional standards, yet in reality they compel both practitioners and researchers to adopt specific viewpoints that are often contested or not empirically established.

A clear example is the requirement or pressure to use activist-preferred language around sex and gender, such as the phrase “gender assigned at birth” or to include a variety of gender options that exist only within social justice perspectives. This is done under the guise of avoiding offence or “psychological harm” among trans- or queer-identifying individuals. Firstly, the decision to attempt to shield certain individuals from offence or “psychological harm” via the use of social justice language necessarily involves deeming other groups as of less importance. Whilst one form of language may be preferred by one group of individuals, other forms are preferred by others, so in this sense ethics reviewers are implicitly endorsing the idea that some individuals should be more “protected” from offence than others. Secondly, such principles are based on somewhat extreme and subjective ideas of harm, with which discomfort or offence are frequently conflated.

Finally, while framed as measures to reduce offence, such mandates do not merely minimise discomfort but compel researchers to endorse a particular metaphysical and linguistic framework. Researchers are therefore denied the right to use language that reflects their own evidence-based understanding or philosophical stance. We argue that the fact that some people may feel offended or describe themselves as vulnerable does not automatically confer the right to dictate how others speak, or to distort how they conceptualise scientific constructs such as biological sex. Freedom of belief is a core liberal value enshrined in law in the United Kingdom, and ethics boards that subordinate it to the avoidance of offence or a narrow view of harm undermine the very intellectual autonomy that rigorous scientific inquiry depends on.

A Proposed Solution

We propose that such impositions can be remedied by ethics boards adopting a strictly neutral stance on contested ideological terminology. Researchers must be free to employ language and conceptual frameworks consistent with their scientific understanding and personal convictions, provided the research itself meets standards of clarity, respect for participants, and methodological soundness. For example, an alternative to insisting on the use of gender ideology language would be to include a binary sex question followed by an optional gender question, as seen on the UK census (link to UK Census wordings). Furthermore, committees should evaluate proposals on the basis of evidence and potential for genuine harm rather than conformity to any ideological perspective. This approach protects both participants and the integrity of research.

The Fragility Model and Suggestions of Harm

The Problem

Many current ethics practices operate on a “floor-based,” avoidance-oriented approach that prioritises the elimination of any conceivable distress over the pursuit of positive goods. In combination with the inflated definitions of distress and harm that many ethics committees operate on, this has the potential to further restrict the scope and integrity of scientific research by conceptualising participants as inherently fragile.

A useful example of these principles in action can be seen in informed consent forms and debriefing procedures, which now routinely include extensive mental health signposting, even for studies using well-validated, low-burden measures such as the Beck Depression Inventory. Some modern British university ethics boards now ask researchers to use language strongly suggesting that the survey could cause distress and then provide links to mental health services, often internal university services as well as external services. It is not uncommon, then, for a young impressionable student to participate in a simple personality study and then read in the debrief that some people may find these topics distressing, and here is the number for the Samaritans. The problem with this is twofold: it inadvertently teaches the student (again, after years of prior similar messages) that they are so fragile that they cannot cope with a survey. It also recommends services that we cannot actually vouch for in the context of being referred from a personality survey. Who knows what iatrogenic results come from first suggesting fragility and then referring them to services that may continue to embed that implanted idea. Ironically, because most surveys are generally not at all distressing in twenty-first-century psychology, the teaching to students of the fragility model can in some cases be the most harmful thing about such surveys. We take some comfort though in knowing that people may be resilient to such fragility model messaging, at least in small doses.

This narrow focus on harm avoidance and participant fragility may also encourage extreme risk aversion; for example, participants with pre-existing mental health difficulties are often excluded from studies in areas such as sport psychology. Such exclusions ignore potential benefits to those individuals and overlook the fact that many people without diagnosed conditions could also experience transient discomfort. The underlying assumption, that distress is inherently bad and that shielding people from psychological risk is an unqualified good, receives little critical scrutiny. Yet more general research in psychology has repeatedly shown that mild-to-moderate distress or discomfort is not a universal or inherent evil – rather, its impact depends on the individual and it can in fact serve a crucial role in the development of resilience (e.g. Seery et al., 2010).

This orientation also further erodes personal agency. Guidance from the British Psychological Society (BPS) Code of Human Research Ethics correctly notes that “a reasoned balance should be struck between protecting participants and recognising their agency and capacity” (p. 7). Yet other passages appear to contradict this principle. For instance, the Code states that psychologists should be sensitive to “the possibility of unwittingly causing distress or to creating self-doubt” (p. 9) and warns against research that may lead to “labelling” by participants themselves (p. 10). These formulations imply that researchers are responsible for participants’ subjective reactions and interpretations that cannot be reliably predicted in advance. Treating adults as fragile individuals who must be protected from their own thoughts or ordinary emotional experiences infantilises participants and absolves them of responsibility for how they respond to information.

A Proposed Solution

We envision a more constructive alternative to this harm avoidance model, which would be a positive ethics framework that balances the minimisation of genuine harm with the maximisation of potential benefits and respect for participant autonomy. Positive ethics is a balanced approach to ethics that involves aspiring to one’s highest ethical potential, whereby the researcher or practitioner considers their personal and professional morals, pursues positive virtues, and cultivates positive motivations for ethical behaviour (Handelsman et al., 2002). While positive ethics has gained more exposure in professional practice (e.g. Knapp et al., 2018) where more reflection is required for professional training on topics such as ethics, we propose that the principle of pursuing ethical goods as well as appropriately reducing harm could be constructive in the research field. This should ensure a better balance between risk and reward.

For example, standard, well-validated questionnaires whose content is clearly described in informed consent documents should not require special mental-health disclaimers or signposting. A much better end for most surveys might be a reveal of the study hypotheses, and a couple of links to further reading on that research area. The researcher’s email address might be given so that participants can report any reactions if they wish to, free of prior suggestion. Equally, decisions about participant eligibility should rest on evidence of substantial, foreseeable risk and consideration of benefits rather than speculative fragility. Researchers should not be expected to shield participants from all possible distress or self-reflection; we suggest that it is more respectful of participants to acknowledge that as adults they possess agency and can manage their own emotional responses. Where genuine risk exists, proportionate safeguards are appropriate, but the default assumption should be one of resilience and autonomy rather than vulnerability. This orientation restores balance by protecting participants from real harm without converting ethics review into a mechanism for pre-emptively managing any possible distress.

Conclusions: Consequences and a Positive Vision

We have highlighted these issues and potential alternatives because we believe the cumulative effect of the trends laid out is significant. Ethics committees that operate under illiberal and fragility-based assumptions inevitably restrict the range of permissible projects for both undergraduate students and academic staff. In social science departments, this narrowing of acceptable research topics and methods constitutes one mechanism through which ideological conformity spreads. As Frisby et al. (2023) document, ideological and political bias in psychology influences the socialisation of students, the testing of hypotheses, clinical practice, faculty hiring, and which findings are accepted as established or reflective of the “truth”. Moreover, an exclusive focus on minimising harm inevitably reduces the scope for research that could generate meaningful benefits, namely research that requires participants to engage with challenging or uncomfortable material.

As discussed, a constructive alternative for university ethics boards would be less restrictive, less ideologically prescriptive, and more oriented toward positive ethics. Boards would evaluate applications according to clear, evidence-based criteria of risk and benefit rather than conformity to any ideological framework. They would treat research participants as autonomous adults capable of informed consent and personal responsibility, not as vulnerable individuals requiring constant protection from ideas or language. Committees would reject compelled ideological speech and would insist only on professional standards of clarity and respect, combined with some respect for the input and past research experience of the academics applying for ethics approval. As a subjective response, offence should be understood as the responsibility of the offended party, not a justification for limiting what researchers may study or how they may describe their findings. Such an approach would preserve the valuable protective functions of ethics review while removing the mechanisms that currently allow ideological capture. It would foster greater intellectual diversity, encourage research that genuinely advances knowledge, and model the liberal principles of open inquiry that social sciences require to remain credible.

References

Frisby, C. L., Redding, R. E., O’Donohue, W. T., & Lilienfield, S. O. (2023). Ideological and political bias in psychology: Nature, scope and selections. Springer.

Handelsman, M. M., Knapp, S., & Gottlieb, M. C. (2002). In C. R. Snyder, & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), Positive ethics (pp. 731-744). Oxford University Press.

Honeycutt, N., & Jussim, L. (2020). A model of political bias in social science research. Psychological Inquiry, 31(1), 73–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1722600

Inbar, Y., & Lammers, J. (2012). Political diversity in social and personality psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 496–503. doi:10.1177/1745691612448792

Knapp, S., Gottlieb, M. C., & Handelsman, M. M. (2018). The benefits of adopting a positive perspective in ethics education. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 12, 196-202.

Seery, M. D., Holman, E. A., & Silver, R. C. (2010). Whatever does not kill us: Cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(6), 1025–1041. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021344