XKCD: Research Ethics | Hacker News Reader

XKCD: Research Ethics

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89 pointscodelucas29 comments

Companies have been purposely making people feel bad about themselves for a very long time.

Ads intentionally make people feel ugly, lazy, stupid, fat, dirty, smelly, dandruffy, lonely and ashamed so they'll buy whatever product is on offer.

Commerce is all about manipulating people for profit. I'm not a Facebook fan, but tell me how this is worse than standard operating procedure with every other consumer product?

Because those aren't psychological experiments. Nobody's claiming it's ethical for an ad company to make you feel bad about yourself, but that's not really the point here. The point is that there are strict ethics rules for running experiments, and one of those rules is, except for a limited exception (that does not apply), the subjects need to be knowingly taking part in the experiment.

Advertisements for consumer products are effective precisely because they cause psychological and behavioral changes in consumers.

Companies rigorously test and refine ads to manipulate emotions and behavior on a scale two or three orders of magnitude greater than Facebook's experiment.

Is Facebook's experiment different because they published the results in an academic journal?

I tend to think this experiment is a good example of where informed consent is a limited model. Nonetheless, academic researchers are committed to not do this kind of thing, and breaking your commitments isn't awesome.

I don't think that's generally true though.

Ad companies run experiments on us all the time. When they A/B test across different groups of consumers to see the effectiveness of an ad, they are running a psychological experiment on us without our consent (asking, "how will exposure to this ad affect a person's likelihood of buying our product?").

I think the rules that you're referring to are for federally funded research only. But there's a large body of commercial research that is constantly experimenting on us without our consent.

You're not explaining the inconsistency, you're just giving it a name. If someone says "why are the sentences for crack cocaine 5 times longer than for regular cocaine?", it's silly to answer "because these are the rules we have, and they were passed by official people".

I would postulate it's because people feel uncomfortable in situations where they are made to feel like lab rats, and that as a society we decided that these rules should be in place so that people who do not have the same views do not abuse those of us who do.

Such experiments are run all the time on large populations. So that's nothing new. It's interesting to see what views there will be about this time after decades. X-ray show fitting matchines? Radiation pills to cure everything? Will aspartamine be allowed in food products after 50 years? Will it be allowed only because it was allowed earlier, even if it's known (then) to be dangerous? What about mobile phones and radiation? Is it ok to have 2w microwave trasmitter attached to your head all day long? Etc. Why is alcohol and nicotine still allowed to be sold, even if known to be toxic and damaging to health. What about acetylsalicylic acid as analgesic, and list goes on. Margarines were really popular at one time, and adverticed as healtyh option to butter.

That's really quite a terrible and completely irrelevant analogy. It's not that the rules are different, it's that we have rules, period, for experiments. There are no ethical rules for advertising. There are rules about lying, but that's basically it. But experiments? Yeah, we have ethical rules for those, and Facebook seems to have deliberately ignored them.

What about ad companies running different ads in different markets and analyzing the resulting sales data? Isn't that an experiment?

Not in the sense the OP means. They mean in the sense of a scientific experiment being done nominally to advance our understanding of the world (or in the case of psychology, specifically the mind and our perception of the world), vetted by a review board, and published in a peer-reviewed journal as part of the academic process.

This is very different from the colloquial use of 'experiment' to talk about an A/B test or similar. It's a very specific context where we have very specific rules in order to prevent people from committing horrendous acts in the name of obtaining greater understanding.

You're simply repeating the same error that the GP criticized. Yes, we call the first situation A, and the second, B; and B has [more] rules, while A does not. (A = advertising, B = a Real Experiment)

Great, but why? What it is about B that justifies the different ethical/legal criteria? Surely it's not the fact that eridius applied the label "experiment" to one and not the other?

How can it make sense to say that doing X is ethical "as long as you're just trying to make money, not publish scientific results"? Presumably, certain things are just wrong to do for whatever reason, and that is why scientific bodies user their publishing standards to prevent them from happening. Those reasons are surely just as applicable in other contexts; if scientific bodies don't have rules for those cases, its because they have no influence there, not because they think it's hunky-dory outside the lab!

"Well, yeah, MegaCorp burned people alive, but it's okay because they were just trying to make money, not publish results on human flammability."

How many more different ways can commenters make the above point, so that people will stop replying that "what advertisers do is not a Real Experiment, so they deserve a lesser standard"? That's a restatement of the inconsistency, not a resolution of it.

I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to say "X is wrong, unless you're doing it for a psychological experiment".

You should be at least as much worried about "manipulating human behavior for profit" as you are about "manipulating human behavior in order to publish the most effective ways of doing so"; otherwise, you're just letting yourself get tripped up by the labels.

There's also a major definitional problem with the concept of "manipulating people for profit." Using the most broad definition of "manipulation," most people are okay with some forms of manipulation, and upset with others, although to me the distinction is not very clear.

A sign on a freeway incidating that a certain restaurant is 1 mile ahead probably wouldn't upset many people, but an advertisement for a mobile game might. Both are blatant attempts to manipulate people.

> I'm not a Facebook fan, but tell me how this is worse than standard operating procedure with every other consumer product?

When I see an ad, I know that the company wants me to give them my money. When I see my friend post something on Facebook, they want to communicate or connect in some way ... note that it is not a monetary desire to buy something from a friend, but to connect with them on a human and emotional level. Manipulating the news feed so that there is an appearance of more or less contentment among my friends when that is not what they intended for others to see is manipulative. I've always had "most recent" instead of "top stories" so this wouldn't have affected me, but to imply that it's just like an ad is utter horseshit.

> When I see an ad, I know that the company wants me to give them my money.

Similarly, you should know that everything you see on Facebook is designed to profit from your attention. The choices they make about what ads to show and what to put in your newsfeed are not altruistic. These decisions are about what's best for Facebook, not what's best for you.

If it profits Procter & Gamble or Unilever[0] to show ads that make you feel inferior or anxious, that's what they'll do.

And if Facebook can make you feel lonely or sad so you'll spend more time on Facebook and see more ads, that's what they'll do too.

> to imply that it's just like an ad is utter horseshit

I'm not seeing a big distinction.

[0] http://www.vocativ.com/world/india/indias-5-worst-ads-skin-w...

So then why not do a test to see if injecting grammatical and spelling errors into a friend's post changes one's smug sense of superiority over them? I mean, sure it might be manipulative but hey, that's what ads are, right?

It annoys me a good bit that when I choose the 'recent stories' feed rather than the 'top stories'...whatever it is...that the setting gets reverted every time the app is restarted, or occasionally in the web version as well. Of course, it's par for the course, so it's not like I should be surprised. Yet it seems like the setting is stored on the Facebook servers and seems to persist across browser sessions on the web app.

I guess you could chalk some of that up to incompetence, but most of it to apathy.

I just read this the other day, if you have a link that you access facebook from you can change it to be http://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr [0] and that will fix it for you[1]. Be that as it may, I do agree that it seems to be developer apathy that this hasn't been fixed already.

[0] http://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/262206/make_your_facebook_new...

I found this article quite insightful on this topic: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2014/07/01/faceboo...

Here's my TLDR... If this research enables Facebook to curate people's feeds to make them happier, would we consider the cost acceptable? Does Facebook even have the right to do so? Is it ethical to hide your friend's serious post or cry for help and show you cat pics, even if that will make you happier in the short run? Separately, Danah talks about how the media's hypocritical outrage over this is likely going to lead to Facebook and other companies still doing a bunch of unethical things to increase their revenues, but just becoming more secretive about it.

Seriously, read the article. Don't stop with my inadequate tldr.

The newsfeed doesn't show us every single thing that every friend does. So it has to make some kind of decision about which things to show and which not to show.

If the newsfeed accidentally did a poor job of this (and mine often does), we could accuse facebook of being incompetent (or less than perfectly competent).

If, however, newsfeed intentionally did a poor job of this, and purposely showed us things specifically designed to make us sad, that's gone beyond "less than competent". That's "actively malicious".

THAT is the reason people are getting upset. Or at least it would be if they understood how facebook works.

But you're assuming the competent case is based on some criteria which is ideally unbiased and fair to all. I say, it's impossible to design such a system without knowingly affecting people emotionally on some level.

And what standards body has defined the metrics so that we can measure what a "poor job" is in this case? The comic still stands, Facebook could very well be doing a poor job now, and is that unethical? What if FB's input had no overall effect? Is the test still unethical even though no one was sad? How will we define what is and isn't unethical? If advertisements makes me sad, and FB experiments with placing more ads on my news feed, leading me to become depressed, is that unethical? Are they still intentionally doing a poor job even though they are probably more or less unaware of my disposition to ads?

I think Randall has a fair point here. FB has essentially been doing this for years and something about their latest test got all our panties in a bunch. Its clear though now, FB never had to adhere to any sort of standards for their website.

Going further: what if this was broad exploratory study, not meant to test any specific hypothesis? What if they rated posts based on thousands of features, a parameter space large enough to guarantee they would find plenty of correlations (both spurious and substantial), and randomly perturbed each user's feed and monitored how the features of their contributions changed? I would expect that they already do this, and from the very small amount of detail I've seen in articles about the mood factor so far, I wouldn't be surprised if this was just one of the more interesting correlations that fell out of that sort of process.

And if they had selected for your feed based on "what will make you buy stuff in the ads" and not publish the results, that would just be "business as usual".

And yet that seems a lot more dangerous than this study...

I wonder whether this study really shows what people are inferring from it. Aside from the somewhat unreliable metrics ("not happy" contains happy => positive!), an increase in negative posts when being shown negative posts could subconsciously promote Facebook as a place to vent, etc. I'm sure the study addresses these things, but as usual the summary is "Seeing unhappy things on Facebook makes people unhappy!"

I don't get the controversy over this. How is this different than a news website displaying more tragic stories or more upbeat stories on their homepage, and seeing how it affects users? Someone in another thread mentioned supermarkets playing sad music and happy music. Or even Facebook's normal newsfeed algorithm tweaking, where they've very likely done tests similar to this.

Because in your example, it is an interaction between you and the news site. You expect the news corporation to do this.

Facebook is not about communication between you and Facebook, but between you and other users. Facebook is effectively manipulating communication and the relationship you have with your friends on the website.

The manipulation of the feed is subject to the intent of the manipulation. If the goal is to make sure that you see things you want to do anyways (posts by friends you interact with often, for example), then that seems reasonable. Here the manipulation is not to make the user's experience better.

Their goal is to make you stay on the website the longest, or click on the most ads, or whatever. It's not like facebook is normally benevolent and tuning their filter to help you. In any case, the filter is presumably for posts from distant friends and pages you've subscribed to, not manipulating your close friends.

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