Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Online Research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Online Research. Show all posts

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Scientists Are Just as Confused About the Ethics of Big-Data Research as You

Sarah Zhang
Wired Magazine
Originally published May 20, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Shockingly, though, the researchers behind both of those big data blowups never anticipated public outrage. (The OkCupid research does not seem to have gone through any kind of ethical review process, and a Cornell ethics review board approved the Facebook experiment.) And that shows just how untested the ethics of this new field of research is. Unlike medical research, which has been shaped by decades of clinical trials, the risks—and rewards—of analyzing big, semi-public databases are just beginning to become clear.

And the patchwork of review boards responsible for overseeing those risks are only slowly inching into the 21st century. Under the Common Rule in the US, federally funded research has to go through ethical review. Rather than one unified system though, every single university has its own institutional review board, or IRB. Most IRB members are researchers at the university, most often in the biomedical sciences. Few are professional ethicists.

The article is here.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Psychologist's Work For GCHQ Deception Unit Inflames Debate Among Peers

By Andrew Fishman
The Intercept
Originally posted August 7, 2015

A British psychologist is receiving sharp criticism from some professional peers for providing expert advice to help the U.K. surveillance agency GCHQ manipulate people online.

The debate brings into focus the question of how or whether psychologists should offer their expertise to spy agencies engaged in deception and propaganda.

Dr. Mandeep K. Dhami, in a 2011 paper, provided the controversial GCHQ spy unit JTRIG with advice, research pointers, training recommendations, and thoughts on psychological issues, with the goal of improving the unit’s performance and effectiveness. JTRIG’s operations have been referred to as “dirty tricks,” and Dhami’s paper notes that the unit’s own staff characterize their work using “terms such as ‘discredit,’ promote ‘distrust,’ ‘dissuade,’ ‘deceive,’ ‘disrupt,’ ‘delay,’ ‘deny,’ ‘denigrate/degrade,’ and ‘deter.’” The unit’s targets go beyond terrorists and foreign militaries and include groups considered “domestic extremist[s],” criminals, online “hacktivists,” and even “entire countries.”

The entire article is here.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

Harvard Researchers Used Secret Cameras to Study Attendance. Was That Unethical?

By Rebecca Koenig and Steve Kolowich
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published November 6, 2014

A high-tech effort to study classroom attendance at Harvard University that used secret photo surveillance is raising questions about research ethics among the institution’s faculty members. The controversy heated up on Tuesday night, when a computer-science professor, Harry R. Lewis, questioned the study at a faculty meeting.

During the study, which took place in the spring of 2013, cameras in 10 Harvard classrooms recorded one image per minute, and the photographs were scanned to determine which seats were filled.

To some professors, it was an obvious intrusion into their privacy—and their students’.

The entire article is here.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Furor Erupts Over Facebook's Experiment on Users

By Reed Albergotti
The Wall Street Journal
Originally published June 30, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

The research, published in the March issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sparked a different emotion - outrage - among some people who say Facebook toyed with its users emotions and uses members as guinea pigs.

"What many of us feared is already a reality: Facebook is using us as lab rats, and not just to figure out which ads we'll respond to but actually change our emotion," wrote Animalnewyork.com, a blog post that drew attention to the study Friday morning.

Facebook has long run social experiments.  Its Data Science Team is tasked with turning the reams of information created by the more than 800 million people who log on every day into usable scientific research.

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Scholars call for new ethical guidelines to direct research on social networking

By Jennifer Sereno
University of Wisconsin-Madison News
Originally published January 2013

The unique data collection capabilities of social networking and online gaming websites require new ethical guidance from federal regulators concerning online research involving adolescent subjects, an ethics scholar from the Morgridge Institute for Research and a computer and learning sciences expert from Tufts University argue in the journal Science.

Increasingly, academics are designing and implementing research interventions on social network sites such as Facebook to learn how these interventions may affect user behavior, knowledge, attitudes and psychological health. Online games are being used as research interventions. However, the ability to mine user data (including information about Facebook "friends"), sensitive personal information and behavior raises concerns that deserve closer ethical scrutiny, say Pilar Ossorio and R. Benjamin Shapiro.

Ossorio is a bioethics scholar-in-residence at the Morgridge Institute, a private, nonprofit biomedical research institute on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. She also holds joint appointments as a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin Law School and the School of Medicine and Public Health. Shapiro is an assistant professor in computer science and education at Tufts, where he is a member of the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach. He previously held appointments in educational research at Morgridge and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.

"Given the unprecedented ability of online research using social network sites to identify sensitive personal information concerning the research subject and the subject's online acquaintances, researchers need clarification concerning applicable ethical and regulatory standards," Ossorio says. "Regulators need greater insights into the possible benefits and harms of online social network research, and researchers need to better understand the relevant ethical and regulatory universe so they can design technical strategies for minimizing harm and complying with legal requirements."

For instance, Ossorio says, researchers may be able to design game features that detect player distress and respond by modifying the game environment, and marry those features to data collection technologies that maximally protect users' privacy while still offering useful data to researchers.

Consent for online research is tricky, particularly when it involves minors. Under Shapiro and Ossorio's analysis, current law does not require that researchers obtain parental permission to conduct studies of adolescents on social networking sites. Parental permission is required for younger children, while adolescents and adults provide their own consent. Of course, parents can prohibit their adolescents from any online activity, including research participation, regardless of legal limits on researchers. Parents have the same amount of control over their adolescents' online research participation as they do over any other online activity in which their teens engage.

"Researchers should use the online environment to deliver innovative, informative consent processes that help participants understand the dimensions of the research and the accompanying data collection," Shapiro says. "This is especially important given the general public's ignorance about the ability to collect massive amounts of personal data over the Internet."

If traditional approaches to consent are of limited value for protecting online subjects, Ossorio says, then researchers and regulators should emphasize other aspects of research ethics, such as using all reasonable approaches to minimize research risks. Also, researchers should seek innovative methods for generating transparency around the research enterprise.

Writing in the Policy Forum section of the Jan. 11 edition of Science, Shapiro and Ossorio conclude by emphasizing that the richness of online information should not become the sole domain of commercial marketing interests but should be used to advance understanding of human behavior and inspire positive social outcomes. Elucidating ethical and legal guidelines for design research on social media will create new opportunities for researchers to understand and improve society.

The news release is here.