Portfolio 5 – Handling Potential Unethical Abuses

The essence of a study or even a research is to discover something new or reconfirm other study or researches. However, it does not mean everything is over when something has been discovered or reconfirmed. What are not less important are presenting the results, and predicts the effects of these results. There is no perfect research. No matter how good it is, there will be a weakness hole to dig. So, it is very important for researchers to minimize bad effects their research may incur.

Basically, the simplest way to handle potential abuses, most commonly unethical abuses, is to conduct a survey or drawing some people’s opinion which are from different backgrounds. We cannot just rely on experts’ view, since many readers are with zero knowledge about our research. Usually this will need a broad and general question, such as “What would you do if you can detect your potential through brain image?” if the research is about brain-scanning to predict human’s potential.

Experts may come with a help also, since they can predict general response to research. For example, experts predict that many parents will compare their child’s brain scans to famous person, and might give up to train or let the child to improve in a particular area. With this, we can do a more specific approach, for example interviewing parents from different background of financial, education, or position.

Both these methods should be able to give better prediction, and will help in handling potential abuses. For example, if a reasonable amount of people say, “I will stop doing anything other than the potential I found through imaging,” we can add some suggestions. For instance, we can emphasize that success is more about hard work. While possessing potential is a good ground to start, but to finish, we need hard work more than potential. More serious way is to cooperate with authority to prevent anyone from forcing someone else to follow only what the brain scans tell, for example parents who forbid their children to play sports merely because the children’s brain scans do not match with those of famous sports stars.