Week 1 – assignment 1: prepare your ethics autobiography

Understanding who you are and how you might behave in a certain situation requires you to take a step back and consider how you established your own personal values and ethics. The helping professions, including psychology, require you to interact with individuals whose experience may be quite different from your own, presenting frequent ethical dilemmas.

This week’s assigned readings will provide some good insights into moral and ethics development. For this task, prepare a reflection paper as you discuss your professional and personal outlook on ethics and ethics in psychology, and reflect on what you read.

Consider the following questions as you prepare your reflection paper:

• What event or personal example (taken from your life experience, observation of others, or even literature or film) has impressed you personally from an ethical perspective?
• Before beginning this course, what thoughts have you had about right and wrong professional behavior (ethics) in psychology? Where does this conception of professional ethics come from?
• After visiting the American Psychological Association’s website, and reviewing psychology subfields, which subfields do you believe are most compatible with who you are as a person? Which ones might present an ethical challenge to you?
• Which subfields do you believe are most compatible with who you are as a person? 
• What subfields do you believe might present an ethical challenge for you?

Length: 3-5 pages