Lecture 22 Flashcards
What did milgram’s obedience study spur?
Milgram’s obedience studies spurred development of new policies regarding the rights of human subjects
What are the 3 ways that ethics can differ?
Differ by Nation
Example: Poland still permits Milgram-like studies
Differ by research field
Example: Experimental economics generally disallows deception
Canada – Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS)
Research Ethics Board (REB) reviews all human subjects research
TCPS formally guides how ethics looks with subjects.
What are the three councils in the tri council?
CIHR
NSERC
SSHRC
What is the TCPS 2 principle of Respect for persons? Who can’t consent?
Respect for Persons:
Respecting autonomy (or informed choice) of people to participate or decline (This can be tricky with consent forms because we need them to have autonomy but we don’t want to tll them everything that will happen in the stud. )
Who cannot consent?
Children (They may not have the same degree of choice or may not be able to decide whether it would be good for them to participate. They may not understand the risks or benefits. We need to ask these people if they want to participate and need to get the legal guardian to also agree to those procedures. ( This applies to children, psychiatric patients, and the cognitively diminished))
Psychiatric patients
Prisoners
Economically vulnerable
for the economically vulnerable and prisoners we need to be careful of coercion. If you are a prisoner, you don’t have a lot of autonomy over their lives. Even posing the question do you want to participate or not can be challenging. You need to have a good understanding of what is the environment like in this prison?
When it comes to the economically vulnerable we need to think about how our incentives might be perceived as coercion. )
Cognitively diminished
I consent critical to respect for persons? How can this be tricky with social media?
yes.
Do people know what they’re agreeing to?
What could go wrong?
explain the facebook study that violated respect for persons
IV: Emotional expressions in feed
1. Positive content culled (negative condition)
2. Random content culled (control condition)
3. Negative content culled (positive condition)
DV: Emotionality of individuals’ posts indexed using LIWC
Percentage of positive emotion words in Ss posts
Percentage of negative emotion words in Ss posts § N = 689,003 profiles
Ethical considerations:
Experiment conducted by Facebook team
Data passed from Facebook team to Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock (2014)
“This work was consistent with Facebook’s ‘Data Use Policy,’ to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research.” (Kramer et al., 2014)
Consent? Autonomy?
passing the study back and forth allowed the psychologists to circumvent the procedure of ethical approval.
What is the principle of concer nfor welfare?
Concern for Welfare:
Minimize risks of participation
Maximize benefits to Ss and to society
Explain the gay facial recognition study and how it violates ocncern for wlefare
IV: Profile pictures on online dating sites
Note this is not manipulated, and thus a predictor variable
DV: Binary prediction of gay vs. straight
N = 30,000 profile pictures (consent not obtained)
“Unfortunately it isn’t feasible to get explicit permission for a study like this. I do take care to preserve individuals’ privacy.” (Kosinski, 2018)
Risks to participants?
Benefits to participants?
Benefits to society?
anything we store in an electronic file is potentially accessible. We don’t have security protocols that protect everything. Things are hacked all the time.
What is the ethical principle of justice? What are examples of study that violated this?
Fair distribution of research benefits & burdens
Tuskegee Syphilis study
399 Black Americans not treated for syphilis
Results assumed to generalize to White Americans
Moore & Tisdall (1940-50s)
Tested Pablum infant cereal in First Nations communities
Control group:
Denied proper nutrition
Denied emergency dental care
Again, results assumed to generalize to those who did not share the burden of research participation
does the REB slow the process of research?
yes
