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It is likely that quite a few people would lie if they knew they were going to be observed/studied or reported on. However, I'm sure they could've made the actu

It is likely that quite a few people would lie if they knew they were going to be observed/studied or reported on. However, I'm sure they could've made the actual email less threatening and more friendly/ethical without revealing research intent. (or the intent to research this specfic aspect)

Ansil849 5y ago
> It is likely that quite a few people would lie if they knew they were going to be observed/studied or reported on. Even assuming your premise is true (it's not), you think the solution to not have people lie is....to lie to them?
shkkmo 5y ago
Yes, there are reasons that studies sometimes lie to their participants. These lies are something that has to be justified to an IRB and the study has to be designed to carefully minimize harm. Lieing to unwilling particiants only raises that bar. In this case, the bare minimum ethical way to conduct this study would have been a careful manual review of every unwilling participant that was going to be recieving deceptive communication to ensure they actually fell under the laws in question. The compound of deception, legal intimidation, and scatter shot automated selection of unwilling participants is a particularly egregious ethical failure.
ineedasername 5y ago
>people would lie Possibly. And the IRB review process may allow for non disclosure under circumstances of that sort. The problem is not merely that the IRB allowed non disclosure. It's that the IRB also granted an exemption from full review as human subject research. If the researcher expected that human behavior might change based on secrecy vs. disclosure then it is fundamentally not passive data collection. But debating the secrecy issue or limits if what constitutes a human subject are all besides the point: the research protocol had an adverse impact on humans involved with the study. Not matter any other considerations, that makes the research defacto one that should have had full IRB review. Evaluating the potential for adverse impact is literally one of the foundational reasons for the existence of IRBs. The presence of an adverse impact is defacto proof that an exemption should not have been granted and that a full review should have been done to determine how the protocols could be tweaked to mitigate the issue.

Ansil849 5y ago

> It is likely that quite a few people would lie if they knew they were going to be observed/studied or reported on. Even assuming your premise is true (it's not), you think the solution to not have people lie is....to lie to them?

shkkmo 5y ago

Yes, there are reasons that studies sometimes lie to their participants. These lies are something that has to be justified to an IRB and the study has to be designed to carefully minimize harm. Lieing to unwilling particiants only raises that bar. In this case, the bare minimum ethical way to conduct this study would have been a careful manual review of every unwilling participant that was going to be recieving deceptive communication to ensure they actually fell under the laws in question. The compound of deception, legal intimidation, and scatter shot automated selection of unwilling participants is a particularly egregious ethical failure.

ineedasername 5y ago

>people would lie Possibly. And the IRB review process may allow for non disclosure under circumstances of that sort. The problem is not merely that the IRB allowed non disclosure. It's that the IRB also granted an exemption from full review as human subject research. If the researcher expected that human behavior might change based on secrecy vs. disclosure then it is fundamentally not passive data collection. But debating the secrecy issue or limits if what constitutes a human subject are all besides the point: the research protocol had an adverse impact on humans involved with the study. Not matter any other considerations, that makes the research defacto one that should have had full IRB review. Evaluating the potential for adverse impact is literally one of the foundational reasons for the existence of IRBs. The presence of an adverse impact is defacto proof that an exemption should not have been granted and that a full review should have been done to determine how the protocols could be tweaked to mitigate the issue.