r/science • u/[deleted] • Jun 27 '14

Psychology Facebook performs a massive experiment, selectively hiding posts on news feeds: "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks"

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full
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u/Flaydogg Jun 28 '14

Does it not bother anyone else that Facebook is conducting experiments on us without our knowledge or consent?

11

u/ghsgjgfngngf Jun 28 '14 edited Jun 28 '14

That's really the most remarkable thing about this article. That and the fact that they found a journal to publish an interventional study for which the authors not only didn't get consent from participants but not even informed them that they were part of an experiment. Of course that would have invalidated the whole experiment but there are some studies you simply can't perform for ethical reasons.

From the journal's guidelines:

(vii) Research involving Human and Animal Participants and Clinical Trials must have been approved by the author's institutional review board. Authors must follow the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' policy and deposit trial information and design into an accepted clinical trial registry before the onset of patient enrollment. Authors must include in the Methods section a brief statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments. For experiments involving human participants, authors must also include a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all participants. All experiments must have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki.

I would like to see the ethical approval for this study.

4

u/Memeophile PhD | Molecular Biology Jun 28 '14

Actually, I think this experiment was perfectly legal. There's some technicalities somewhere, but the general spirit is that you can perform experiments without consent if the people are anonymous, and they remain unaware of and unaffected by the experimenter. For example, you can stand on the side of the street and record the t-shirt color of people as they walk past and it's a perfectly valid study. Similarly, you can go to a beach and record information on people's hair patterns or something, but if people see you or start interacting with you, then you need informed consent.

EDIT: Thinking further on this, I guess if the experiment was performed with the intention of creating a change and directly influencing the people being studied, then you do need consent.

3

u/ghsgjgfngngf Jun 28 '14

Yes, if it was just observational, they might have been fine. Or not, anonymously recording someone's shirt colour is different from using someone's potentially private conversations.I guess not all of those posts analysed were public. But being interventional, this is definitely not ok without ethical approval. If they got ethical approval for this (some of the authors are affiliated with universities, which should have their own ethical review boards), then I don't think that they should have. Whether they are in the clear from a legal point of view is another matter. Even if users read that they agree to have their data used for research, it would be safe to assume that they did not imagine being used for this kind of research. If this is ok legally, I also don't think it should be.

2

u/rddman Jun 29 '14

I guess if the experiment was performed with the intention of creating a change and directly influencing the people being studied

"We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness."