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And to be fair, institutional reviews and consent exist for good reason. Not so long ago it was acceptable to conduct psychological or even medical tests on uni

by eli 11y ago

And to be fair, institutional reviews and consent exist for good reason. Not so long ago it was acceptable to conduct psychological or even medical tests on uninformed participants, sometimes with terrible results. There are legitimate arguments beyond just "for PR"

URSpider94 11y ago
Sure, I didn't mean to imply that there's not a good reason to have these rules. However, I think it's fair to argue that the driving force to get consent forms for one's friends and family (or even for oneself) for a one-off middle school science fair project is not to protect them from predation by overly aggressive researchers ...
- eli 11y ago
  I guess a disagree. It's really hard to effectively enforce a policy where "obviously safe" experiments don't need any at all review. You'd need some kind of review to determine if they need a review...
thaumasiotes 11y ago
It is still acceptable to conduct psychological experiments on uninformed participants; everyone in the world does it every day. It is only "unacceptable" if you call yourself a psychologist while you're doing it, and subsequently try to publish a paper about it in one of the standard journals of the field. Just by way of example, I saw a very funny TV show in which the setup was this: someone dressed up in a beekeeping suit walked through a public park with a stack of white boxes, stumbled, dropped them, and started sprinting in the other direction. The show did this several times and aired the footage. It turns out that people in a public park are likely to run after the seemingly-panicked guy in bee armor when he runs away from a pile of boxes he just dropped. If you wrote a paper about this after doing it rather than showing your footage on TV, it would be totally unexceptional as a psych experiment. But writing the paper doesn't make the experiment any more or less dangerous to the unwitting subjects. It's just the trigger for institutional review. The review system exists because professional researchers today generally are not self-funding. This isn't a problem for science fair entrants.
- zyxley 11y ago
  The beekeeper reminds me of a Schlock Mercenary quote: "A Sergeant in motion outranks a Lieutenant who doesn't know what's going on. An ordnance technician at a dead run outranks everybody."

by eli 11y ago

URSpider94 11y ago

Sure, I didn't mean to imply that there's not a good reason to have these rules. However, I think it's fair to argue that the driving force to get consent forms for one's friends and family (or even for oneself) for a one-off middle school science fair project is not to protect them from predation by overly aggressive researchers ...

eli 11y ago
I guess a disagree. It's really hard to effectively enforce a policy where "obviously safe" experiments don't need any at all review. You'd need some kind of review to determine if they need a review...

thaumasiotes 11y ago

It is still acceptable to conduct psychological experiments on uninformed participants; everyone in the world does it every day. It is only "unacceptable" if you call yourself a psychologist while you're doing it, and subsequently try to publish a paper about it in one of the standard journals of the field. Just by way of example, I saw a very funny TV show in which the setup was this: someone dressed up in a beekeeping suit walked through a public park with a stack of white boxes, stumbled, dropped them, and started sprinting in the other direction. The show did this several times and aired the footage. It turns out that people in a public park are likely to run after the seemingly-panicked guy in bee armor when he runs away from a pile of boxes he just dropped. If you wrote a paper about this after doing it rather than showing your footage on TV, it would be totally unexceptional as a psych experiment. But writing the paper doesn't make the experiment any more or less dangerous to the unwitting subjects. It's just the trigger for institutional review. The review system exists because professional researchers today generally are not self-funding. This isn't a problem for science fair entrants.

zyxley 11y ago
The beekeeper reminds me of a Schlock Mercenary quote: "A Sergeant in motion outranks a Lieutenant who doesn't know what's going on. An ordnance technician at a dead run outranks everybody."