One important principle advocated by the APA is the right of informed consent, which states that the experimenter has a clear obligation to:

a) Obtain approval from a committee that judges the ethics of the proposed research before performing an experiment involving human participants.

b) Balance the potential worth of the research against the potential harm to the participants prior to doing the experiment.

c) Explain to the participants all salient features of the research before the experiment is done so the participants have the opportunity to decline to participate.

d) Inform the participants of the results of the research prior to publication of a journal article.