Research ethics reveal the tension between psychology's goal of advancing human welfare and its methods for doing so. Psychologists study various facets of normal and atypical functioning in order to (among other things) devise eective treatments, create preventive strategies, and orient social policies to promote human welfare. But their investigations sometimes threaten individual well-being, such as when research participants are stressed, deceived, or placed at risk of harm in studies of therapeutic or policy relevance. To obtain usable knowledge in an ethically responsible manner, researchers sometimes modify research protocols to safeguard the rights of research participants, even though doing so often abridges the quality of the ®ndings yielded by their investigations. Professional concern with research ethics thus underscores psychology's commitment to advancing human welfare through scienti®c methods that respect human rights, even at a cost of limiting new knowledge.
These tensions between the goals of psychological inquiry and the methods of research are especially apparent when children are research participants. Because children do not understand the research process as well as adults, they cannot as competently protect their rights, and consequently adults are enlisted to do so for them. But children's limited social power and the incentives for their involvement in research make every proxy consent (by parents or other adults) an inadequate ensurance that their needs and interests will be safeguarded. Parents' interests and perspectives are not always identical with those of ospring. For these reasons, some (e.g. have argued that young children can never be ethically permitted to participate in research that does not have direct therapeutic bene®t for them. This conclusion seems overreaching, however, given the broad range of important research questions involving children for which results can have signi®cant bene®ts to other children as well as future generations, such as research on teaching and learning, the prevention and treatment of psychological dysfunction, and the identi®cation and prosecution of child maltreatment. In many cases, studies on these topics expose children to risk of harms that seem very minor when compared with the broader potential societal bene®ts of the knowledge they yield. Even so, this risk± bene®t calculus remains very challenging because children who are research participants cannot easily defend their interests or voice the harms they may experience in research contexts.
We applaud Herrmann and Yoder's eort to foster collegial dialogue about research ethics among investigators concerned with child memory.