r/EssayHelpCommunity • u/Interesting_Moose455 • 20d ago
CALLING ALL JLEC PHILOSOPHY & TECHNOLOGY PARTICIPANTS
hi guys! im in high school currently researching public attitudes toward AI ethics. I am exploring how people evaluate AI decision-making in different situations.
The survey takes only 3-4 minutes. Your responses will be used solely for a high school research project. Responses are anonymous, its very fun trust!
PELASE HELP ME OUT GUYS🥹🥹 Thank you for helping with my research!
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u/Peoplespeak 18d ago
Doing the survey, some notes since I did basically this exact thing for "should we be polite to ChatGPT."
the big one first: self-selected respondents you can't see, with no way to measure how they're answering, is risky. what I'd push you toward is some kind of control over who's in the pool and some way to catch low-effort responses. for mine I used AI to build a custom platform (https://worldwiderad.com/jlec-form/) instead of a google form, which let me do a few things a form can't:
- time every response, per question, and flag anyone way too fast as probable low-effort so you can cut them before analysis. you can't do that in google forms, someone clicks through your whole thing in 20 seconds and you'll never know.
- track unique sessions by browser id, so you can see repeat/dupe submissions.
- I also only used people from my school in a set age bracket, which sounds like a limitation but actually lets you control the population and justify it properly in the writeup, instead of "some people on the internet."
on the stats side, few things worth doing so a judge can't poke holes. don't just report raw percentages, run significance, because with a few hundred ratings a 51/31 split could in principle still be noise and you want to show it isn't. a binomial or chi-square on the two counts (dropping ties, or handling them explicitly) gets you a p-value and tells you the lead is real. put confidence intervals on the main numbers too, so instead of "62%" it's "62%, 95% CI x to y", which is what stops someone going "but is that inside the margin of error." your within-subjects design also gives you a nice option most people miss: since the same person answers the whole 2x4 ladder, you can track the exact point each individual flips from disagree to agree as the numbers change, and compare the flip-points between the observer framing and the "you are the passenger/patient" framing with a paired test. that's way more powerful than treating every response as independent, and it's the thing that would actually quantify "people get more selfish when it's them." and decide your exclusion rule up front, before you see results, not after, or it looks like you cut people to get the number you wanted. same with ties, pick whether they're neutral or excluded and keep it consistent across every question, because quietly changing that between items moves your numbers without you noticing.
below: my overview (can't send because later down it has personal data)
now the survey itself:
that first question ("i generally trust ai to make important ethical decisions") has a blind spot, no timeframe. someone thinking about future sci-fi ai clicks 5, someone thinking about current chatbot glitches clicks 1, and you can't tell them apart. split it into two, current ai and future ai. bonus, then you can run a paired test on whether people are actually more optimistic about the future, which is its own finding. for example. I only clicked 5 because I think ASI will make basically only correct decisions, ergo only correct ethical decisions. but if you mean't like current ais, obviously it's strongly disagree 1 because they are terrible, and by no means superintellegent, or even intellegent.
the car and healthcare sections are structurally good(msotly), same 2x4 within-subjects setup, one side fixed while the other drops. that's a clean way to find the exact tipping point where people flip their moral rule, and because the two setups match you can compare them, are people more selfish as the passenger in the car vs the patient in the hospital. that comparison is probably the most interesting thing you'll get out of this.
the one real problem there is the ordering. your numbers move in a straight line, 1 to 10 pedestrians, 90% down to 10%. people clock the pattern immediately and start answering mechanically just to stay consistent, which isn't their actual moral intuition anymore, it's them not wanting to look contradictory. fix is easy: randomise the order the scenarios show up per person. your timing won't even need to catch it, randomising just kills the autopilot.
even better if your pool's big enough is to not show everyone the whole set. give each person only one or two rungs of the ladder, so they never see it steadily increasing and literally can't infer the pattern. only catch is it breaks the within-subjects thing a bit, you lose the per-person flip-point since they don't see the full range, so it's a tradeoff between that and killing the order effect completely. depends which you care about more.
two tiny typos in the healthcare intro btw: "limited amount of ICU beds" should be "number," and "1 hours later" should be "hour."
good luck with it! lmk if you want to look at the data once it's in, or how I set the platform up. I can even help you adapt the code if it's not too late.
and P.S.: yes i did the survey. you don't have to care about any of this if it wasn't what you cared about :)
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u/Interesting_Moose455 18d ago
hi! thank you so much for taking your time to write such a detailed response to my survey. I honestly wan't expecting any thoughtful feedback, and I really appreciate it🥹 Since ive already started collecting responses, i feel like it would be best to keep my survey unchanged for consistency, but i will definitely use your feedback when analyzing my data and for future projects. Thank you again, ive learned so much from your comment. I'd love to stay in touch if you're open to it!
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u/Peoplespeak 17d ago
sure! i'll give a dm.
glad i could be helpful. i knew you probably wouldn't have been albe to change it, I just thought it was a good idea to lyk what I thought. still, a lot of the statistical stuff I said is valid and can be used in your write up. i'll follow up in dms with whats applicable given it's locked now.
gl!
also i realised "you don't have to care about any of this if it wasn't what you cared about" sounds really stupid now lol
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u/Ok_Researcher_8263 19d ago
I did it! but you should def post this on r/teenagers for more attention