Ethics & Professional Integrity
Ethics in this portfolio means a commitment to academic integrity, privacy, accurate representation, and responsible professional conduct. In psychology work, ethics is not limited to following rules. It also requires care in how people, sources, experiences, and contributions are represented.
Academic Integrity
Academic integrity means that my work should reflect my own learning and effort. When I use outside sources, collaborative work, media, or research materials, I will provide appropriate attribution and avoid presenting another person's work as my own. That means citing every source I use and correcting a claim when the source does not support it.
Privacy and Consent
Privacy and consent are also important. I will avoid including sensitive personal information, private communications, or identifying details about others unless I have permission and a clear academic reason to do so. This is especially important in psychology work, where confidentiality, personal experience, and sensitive topics may be involved. I keep private communications out of this portfolio and use only coursework and my own experience.
Accessibility
Accessibility is part of ethical communication. I will work to keep this portfolio clear and easy to navigate, using headings, descriptive links, readable formatting, and appropriate descriptions for uploaded materials or media when needed. Images carry alt text, headings stay clear, and each embedded file has an Open document link beneath it.
Ethical Presentation
Ethical presentation also means describing my own work accurately. My resume, curriculum vitae, research activity, and submitted materials should reflect my actual role and contribution without exaggeration. The purpose of this portfolio is not only to show achievement, but to present that achievement honestly and professionally. I label simulated court work as a course assignment, keep manuscript status current, and state my real role on co-authored work.
Research Ethics Training
The CITI Program's Social and Behavioral Research course, completed through Southern New Hampshire University, addressed ethical research involving human participants, informed consent, privacy, confidentiality, and researcher responsibility. This certification supports my preparation for behavioral and social science research involving sensitive populations and mental health topics.
False Confessions and Deceptive Interrogation Practices: An Amicus Brief
PSY 306 | Amicus brief
This paper examines whether police interrogation tactics can increase the likelihood of a false confession. The case centers on Jake Delaney, an 18-year-old questioned for four hours starting at 3:40 a.m., told false claims about DNA evidence, and led to believe that admitting involvement could mean two years instead of 20 years to life. The assignment asked me to do what a forensic psychologist does for a court: compare the conditions of questioning with the research, then state plainly where that research stops. Social influence and compliance explained how false evidence and implied leniency can change the choices a suspect believes he has, but low-stakes laboratory paradigms could not tell me whether Jake personally confessed falsely. Keeping that line clear, and keeping Frazier v. Cupp and People v. Stewart separate from what the science shows, was the central discipline of the paper. It also connects to my research on suicide risk underdetection among veterans, because what a person says under pressure is not always an accurate picture of what is true. This brief was written for a forensic psychology course assignment on a simulated case. It was not filed with a court and was not endorsed by the American Psychological Association.
Power Increases Hypocrisy: Analyzing Lammers et al. (2010)
PSY 222 | Course project
This analysis examines Lammers et al. (2010), a five-experiment study showing that power increases moral hypocrisy: high-power participants judged other people's moral violations more strictly while treating their own more leniently. I evaluated the methods, measures, results, and discussion, including the power manipulations, the private dice-roll lottery in Experiment 1, and the limits of 338 young Dutch student participants drawn by convenience sampling. Experiment 5 added a key qualification, since illegitimate power reversed the pattern into what the authors called hypercrisy, and later work by Lamprinakos et al. (2024) showed that power can increase or decrease cheating depending on which thoughts it validates. This critique ties back to my experience managing large retail stores. I saw managers make professional mistakes involving employees, communication, and boundaries, and the stores where I worked emphasized humility and accountability because a manager's mistakes affect more people. I tried to follow the same rules I expected my associates to follow. This connects to Ethics, holding myself to the standard I apply to others, and to Career Connections, because authority in any professional role carries the same risk.