46 - Observational Research, Prediction, and Ethics

Summary

The ethical issue I describe in this chapter originates in an early phase of my career. As an assistant professor interested in developmental psychopathology, I was eager to push the envelope of the field, conceptually, methodologically, and clinically (for recent perspectives on developmental psychopathology, see Hinshaw, 2013). A priority was devising an objective means of evaluating risk for future antisocial behavior, beyond the common strategies of asking adult informants (rater bias can be a hindrance) or giving cognitive tests (poorly validated for this purpose). Writing my first major federal grant proposal, I pondered what an advance it might be to use direct observations of child behavior for this purpose. Yet two major problems loomed: the scourge of false-positive predictions so often found in this arena, with their potentially stigmatizing labels (e.g., “pre-delinquent”); and the difficulty of creating the circumstances in which nascent antisocial behavior might be observed at sufficiently high base rates to be of use.

When all else fails, go to the scientific literature! I reread the classic work of Hartshorne and May (1928), who decades before had probed the moral character of schoolchildren. Some of the key investigations involved tempting youth to engage in behavior patterns like cheating. I pondered how to apply such methods to other forms of covert antisocial behavior, such as stealing or destroying property, already suspected as stronger predictors of delinquent behavior than overt behaviors such as physical aggression.