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Oh, please. Every single time Facebook changes anything on their site it "manipulates users' emotions". Show more content from their friends? Show less? Show m

by azakai 12y ago

Oh, please. Every single time Facebook changes anything on their site it "manipulates users' emotions". Show more content from their friends? Show less? Show more from some friends? Show one type of content more, another less? Change the font? Enlarge/shrink thumbnail images? All these things affect users on all levels, including emotionally, and Facebook does such changes every day. Talking about "informed consent" in the context of a "psychological experiment" here is bizarre. The "subjects" of the "experiment" here are users of Facebook. They decided to use Facebook, and Facebook tweaks the content it shows them every single day. They expect that. That is how Facebook and every other site on the web (that is sophisticated enough to do studies on user behavior) works. If this is "immoral", then an website outage - which frustrates users hugely - should be outright evil. And shutting down a service would be an atrocity. Of course all of these are ludicrous. The only reason we are talking about this is because it was published, so all of a sudden it's "psychological research", which is a context rife with ethical limitations. But make no mistake - Facebook and all other sophisticated websites do such "psychological research" ALL THE TIME. It's how they optimize their content to get people to spend more time on their sites, or spend more money, or whatever they want. If anyone objects to this, they object to basically the entire modern web.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Exactly. I find this situation to be an example of ridiculous pattern matching. Is it published? Then it's a psychological experiment, and needs to be evaluated by an ethics board. Is it just A/B testing? Then it's not "science", so no need for ethics board.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  So as long as you aren't publishing the results of your experimentation, none of the ethics that apply to experimenting on humans apply? That's an...interesting...theory.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Well that seems to me to be a core issue here. Otherwise, you'd need to get IRB permission for every A/B test you do on your website.
  - azakai 12y ago
    Any A/B test is "experimentation on humans". Facebook and all other web giants constantly do such behavioral studies. The only difference is that this one was published. In other words, if someone argues that this was unethical experimentation on humans, then there are 1,000 other studies we never heard of that are far, far worse. But we know they exist. It doesn't make sense to argue that. Websites have to experiment with different ways of doing things, and seeing how that affects their users. This isn't just a web thing either, of course - businesses need to try different things in order to optimize themselves. And to measure which is the best to get people to spend more.

by azakai 12y ago

TeMPOraL 12y ago

Exactly. I find this situation to be an example of ridiculous pattern matching. Is it published? Then it's a psychological experiment, and needs to be evaluated by an ethics board. Is it just A/B testing? Then it's not "science", so no need for ethics board.

dragonwriter 12y ago
So as long as you aren't publishing the results of your experimentation, none of the ethics that apply to experimenting on humans apply? That's an...interesting...theory.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Well that seems to me to be a core issue here. Otherwise, you'd need to get IRB permission for every A/B test you do on your website.
- azakai 12y ago
  Any A/B test is "experimentation on humans". Facebook and all other web giants constantly do such behavioral studies. The only difference is that this one was published. In other words, if someone argues that this was unethical experimentation on humans, then there are 1,000 other studies we never heard of that are far, far worse. But we know they exist. It doesn't make sense to argue that. Websites have to experiment with different ways of doing things, and seeing how that affects their users. This isn't just a web thing either, of course - businesses need to try different things in order to optimize themselves. And to measure which is the best to get people to spend more.