The first research plan breaches and adheres to several of the ethical guidelines set forth by the APA. For the first experiment, the researchers plan to compare the intellectual skills of retired people to those of high school students. Since the researchers are planning to give non-volunteers a lower grade without their consent, they are breaking the standards of informed consent and risk. The high school students that didn't volunteer for the study were not told that they were part of the study. Also, neither the high school students nor retired people were told the intentions for the research, breaching the standard of informed consent. In addition, the act of lowering the students' grades could cause mental risk. When a student is genuinely trying their best and not achieving their goals, they could start to become discouraged enough to give up on studying or build up animosity towards the Psychology teacher. Despite having broken the stated principles, this study adheres to the standards of no coercion, anonymity, and debriefing. The researchers did not physically or mentally intimidate or threaten the participants to be a part of the study. For the students, the researchers did not tell coerce the volunteers or non-volunteers since they were not told of their grade being affected. The study is meant to get data on the group of high school students and retired people as a whole, not individually. Therefore, their privacy is protected since the researchers aren't collecting data that can match a person's responses to their name. After the study, the researchers debriefed by taking the time to tell the participants the purpose and nature of the research and provided the participants with a way to contact the researchers about the results.
The second research plan also breaches and adheres to several of the ethical guidelines set forth by the APA. In this plan, only the standard of no coercion is adhered to.
