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Informed consent is a bedrock of ethical psych research. If a lowly undergrad is expected to get consent before administering any sort of dinky survey, why is F

Informed consent is a bedrock of ethical psych research. If a lowly undergrad is expected to get consent before administering any sort of dinky survey, why is Facebook exempt? They created a study which purposely manipulated the emotional state of their customers in order to publish results in a scientific journal. So Facebook doesn't have to give a shit about ethical research because they're Facebook? I don't understand how people here can't understand why these protocols are in-place and why others see a problem when they are ignored. It was completely unethical.

fiatmoney 12y ago
You may not understand it because you are evaluating it by the standards of "psychological research", and others are evaluating it by the standards of "advertising industry research". "Ethics" aren't a universal Kantian imperative, they're contingent. It's ethical, more or less, for you to talk about about your conversation with your acquaintance, but not if you're an attorney and they're your client, unless they've put it on the record before publicly, etc. Ethical rules usually exist for a normative purpose - eg, to allow people to converse freely with their lawyers. The psychological research community doesn't care about their work actually working or proving something valuable nearly as much as their care about maintaining their status. Conversely, the advertising industry cares very much about proving their capabilities to their clients. So, different ethical regimes.
- glesica 12y ago
  The psychological research community doesn't care about their work actually working or proving something valuable nearly as much as their care about maintaining their status. I was nodding my head and prepared to take you seriously until this sentence. Turns out you're just another HN reader angry at the academic community because you once had a lazy professor or something.
  - fiatmoney 12y ago
    That's a very lazy inference on your part. It's uncontroversial, even within academia, that there is a large amount of statusmongering going on that is orthogonal to "real work". It doesn't imply they don't care at all about the underlying research, but academia is an industry like any other with its own priorities and incentives, and the people who rise to the top are the sort of people who are good at sussing those out. In particular you can view IRBs and the like as a form of entry-restriction by entrenched actors that tries to keep disruptive research from competing.
    - glesica 12y ago
      The fact that there is a great deal of statusmongering says nothing about the relative importance of the "real work" and "statusmongering" in the eyes of people involved. So no, it isn't a lazy inference, the original comment made a mean-spirited and totally unsubstantiated claim and I pointed that out.
  - RA_Fisher 12y ago
    The field receives a pretty scathing review in The Cult of Statistical Significance. The summaries offered there are pretty damning: http://www.amazon.com/The-Cult-Statistical-Significance-Economics/dp/0472050079 http://www.amazon.com/The-Cult-Statistical-Significance-Econ...
- spinchange 12y ago
  Why did Facebook conduct this expressly as psychological research, publishing it in a psychological research journal? It seems to me that the appropriate ethical framework to apply is the research context it was conducted and presented in, not a looser one outsiders wish to see it in. That disparity /conflict of interests is a symptom of the problem here. I'm setting aside the questions of how this experiment even furthers facebook's business interests. My guess is, it doesn't really.
icambron 12y ago
Eh, so someone made up a bunch of rules and stamped "ethics!" on them, and now, completely independent of the original justification, it's somehow the law of the land. But, at least as applied here, it's pretty bogus. Think of this way: there's some sort of algorithm that controls what goes on your Facebook feed. There has to be, basically, or else they just have to show you everything. The algorithm takes in sentiment analysis as part of making those decisions, which seems perfectly reasonable. So far, just by building something that interacts with users and affects their emotions, FB has a completely uncontrolled experiment. If they show negative stories vs positive stories, what happens? So far, they just don't know, which seems really bad. Well, to find out the consequences of what they actually do, they have to dial up and down some knobs and see the effects. If they can't try things and find out what happens, how do you expect them to do anything? Just guess? Even worse, if they just guess, they're still experimenting, but now with way less information. This is completely normal, and every business does it. They have to answer questions about what effect the things they do have, or get stuck not doing anything. A huge part of what businesses do is interact with people, so a huge part of that effect is actually the impact on their customers' emotions. What if we make the colors on this display brighter? What if we play different music in our store? Psychology experiment! You can call it "manipulation" if you want, but you're really just going for cheap connotation points. Almost any editorial decision you could make on any subject with any audience is manipulation. Being systematic about it doesn't make it more so. Do you think you should be asked for consent before being subjected to an A/B test on an ecommerce site? Because you're definitely being manipulated in the relevant sense. It sounds to me like the objections are not so much that FB ran an experiment so much as it's that they published a paper about it. You could argue that that really is dispositive, but, well, nobody is. And it seems if they're going to do some research, we should actually encourage them to share their results.
- Alupis 12y ago
  I believe you completely missed the mark on this one... Facebook themselves understood they needed consent... which is why they added a blurb in their TOS. The only problem... it was 4 months after the "experiment". This was far beyond simple A/B testing. The complete disregard of ethics, and the downright Facebook fanboy-ism that is going on in this thread is bewildering.
Alex3917 12y ago
"If a lowly undergrad is expected to get consent before administering any sort of dinky survey, why is Facebook exempt?" The researchers had IRB approval. And this whole 'scandal' is really just a media experiment to manipulate the emotions of dumb people. If these media reports were phrased like 'Facebook conducts research into affect correlations of user-generated content', which is probably more or less what the original paper actually said, I doubt anyone would care.
- abduhl 12y ago
  This statement is not supported by the article: "Facebook said that since the study on emotions, it has implemented stricter guidelines on Data Science team research. Since at least the beginning of this year, research beyond routine product testing is reviewed by a panel drawn from a group of 50 internal experts in fields such as privacy and data security." In fact, it is directly contradicted by the article.
  - Alex3917 12y ago
    I thought the researcher in this case was Jeff Hancock, who had approval from the Cornell IRB?
- spinchange 12y ago
  The title of the published research paper is: "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks."

fiatmoney 12y ago

You may not understand it because you are evaluating it by the standards of "psychological research", and others are evaluating it by the standards of "advertising industry research". "Ethics" aren't a universal Kantian imperative, they're contingent. It's ethical, more or less, for you to talk about about your conversation with your acquaintance, but not if you're an attorney and they're your client, unless they've put it on the record before publicly, etc. Ethical rules usually exist for a normative purpose - eg, to allow people to converse freely with their lawyers. The psychological research community doesn't care about their work actually working or proving something valuable nearly as much as their care about maintaining their status. Conversely, the advertising industry cares very much about proving their capabilities to their clients. So, different ethical regimes.

glesica 12y ago
The psychological research community doesn't care about their work actually working or proving something valuable nearly as much as their care about maintaining their status. I was nodding my head and prepared to take you seriously until this sentence. Turns out you're just another HN reader angry at the academic community because you once had a lazy professor or something.
- fiatmoney 12y ago
  That's a very lazy inference on your part. It's uncontroversial, even within academia, that there is a large amount of statusmongering going on that is orthogonal to "real work". It doesn't imply they don't care at all about the underlying research, but academia is an industry like any other with its own priorities and incentives, and the people who rise to the top are the sort of people who are good at sussing those out. In particular you can view IRBs and the like as a form of entry-restriction by entrenched actors that tries to keep disruptive research from competing.
  - glesica 12y ago
    The fact that there is a great deal of statusmongering says nothing about the relative importance of the "real work" and "statusmongering" in the eyes of people involved. So no, it isn't a lazy inference, the original comment made a mean-spirited and totally unsubstantiated claim and I pointed that out.
- RA_Fisher 12y ago
  The field receives a pretty scathing review in The Cult of Statistical Significance. The summaries offered there are pretty damning: http://www.amazon.com/The-Cult-Statistical-Significance-Economics/dp/0472050079 http://www.amazon.com/The-Cult-Statistical-Significance-Econ...
spinchange 12y ago
Why did Facebook conduct this expressly as psychological research, publishing it in a psychological research journal? It seems to me that the appropriate ethical framework to apply is the research context it was conducted and presented in, not a looser one outsiders wish to see it in. That disparity /conflict of interests is a symptom of the problem here. I'm setting aside the questions of how this experiment even furthers facebook's business interests. My guess is, it doesn't really.

icambron 12y ago

Eh, so someone made up a bunch of rules and stamped "ethics!" on them, and now, completely independent of the original justification, it's somehow the law of the land. But, at least as applied here, it's pretty bogus. Think of this way: there's some sort of algorithm that controls what goes on your Facebook feed. There has to be, basically, or else they just have to show you everything. The algorithm takes in sentiment analysis as part of making those decisions, which seems perfectly reasonable. So far, just by building something that interacts with users and affects their emotions, FB has a completely uncontrolled experiment. If they show negative stories vs positive stories, what happens? So far, they just don't know, which seems really bad. Well, to find out the consequences of what they actually do, they have to dial up and down some knobs and see the effects. If they can't try things and find out what happens, how do you expect them to do anything? Just guess? Even worse, if they just guess, they're still experimenting, but now with way less information. This is completely normal, and every business does it. They have to answer questions about what effect the things they do have, or get stuck not doing anything. A huge part of what businesses do is interact with people, so a huge part of that effect is actually the impact on their customers' emotions. What if we make the colors on this display brighter? What if we play different music in our store? Psychology experiment! You can call it "manipulation" if you want, but you're really just going for cheap connotation points. Almost any editorial decision you could make on any subject with any audience is manipulation. Being systematic about it doesn't make it more so. Do you think you should be asked for consent before being subjected to an A/B test on an ecommerce site? Because you're definitely being manipulated in the relevant sense. It sounds to me like the objections are not so much that FB ran an experiment so much as it's that they published a paper about it. You could argue that that really is dispositive, but, well, nobody is. And it seems if they're going to do some research, we should actually encourage them to share their results.

Alupis 12y ago
I believe you completely missed the mark on this one... Facebook themselves understood they needed consent... which is why they added a blurb in their TOS. The only problem... it was 4 months after the "experiment". This was far beyond simple A/B testing. The complete disregard of ethics, and the downright Facebook fanboy-ism that is going on in this thread is bewildering.

Alex3917 12y ago

"If a lowly undergrad is expected to get consent before administering any sort of dinky survey, why is Facebook exempt?" The researchers had IRB approval. And this whole 'scandal' is really just a media experiment to manipulate the emotions of dumb people. If these media reports were phrased like 'Facebook conducts research into affect correlations of user-generated content', which is probably more or less what the original paper actually said, I doubt anyone would care.

abduhl 12y ago
This statement is not supported by the article: "Facebook said that since the study on emotions, it has implemented stricter guidelines on Data Science team research. Since at least the beginning of this year, research beyond routine product testing is reviewed by a panel drawn from a group of 50 internal experts in fields such as privacy and data security." In fact, it is directly contradicted by the article.
- Alex3917 12y ago
  I thought the researcher in this case was Jeff Hancock, who had approval from the Cornell IRB?
spinchange 12y ago
The title of the published research paper is: "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks."