Ethical Foundations for Graduate Students in the Psychological Sciences

Preparation to address ethical challenges is an essential component of graduate training, and no less so for the psychological sciences. However, in the absence of uniform guidelines, approaches to training vary in form and quality. Classroom lectures and online training seem to be the mechanisms of choice, but these fall short. First, such approaches conflict with the scholarship on teaching and learning that makes it clear that having a meaningful impact depends on having students actively engaged in constructing their own learning. Second, research is consistent with the intuition that the impact of courses is likely to be far less than that of what happens in a graduate student's research environment. The conclusion is that promoting an ethical culture, and for the training of graduate students in particular, will be well served by enhancing the role of mentors. Examples of options to consider are as follows: (a) recognizing that a primary advisor can be a mentor but should certainly not be considered the only mentor, (b) emphasizing the importance of mentoring for individuals from underrepresented groups (e.g., because of gender or ethnicity), (c) strengthening the American Psychological Association (APA) code of ethics to more fully articulate the full range and importance of mentoring, (d) developing and implementing mechanisms to evaluate and reward effective mentoring, and (e) providing targeted training for faculty advisors to empower them with tools and resources to be effective mentors for ethics generally and the responsible conduct of research specifically.