5 ms·

XKCD: Research Ethics

89 points by codelucas 12y ago

knodi123 12y ago
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.
- spiralganglion 12y ago
  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.
- nemothekid 12y ago
  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.
  - DalekBaldwin 12y ago
    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.
- SilasX 12y ago
  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...
plorg 12y ago
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.
- mijoharas 12y ago
  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 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 http://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr [1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/262206/make_your_facebook_news_feed_default_to_most_recent.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/262206/make_your_facebook_new...
panarky 12y ago
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?
- eridius 12y ago
  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.
  - panarky 12y ago
    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?
    - hyperpape 12y ago
      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.
  - tedsanders 12y ago
    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.
tsycho 12y ago
I found this article quite insightful on this topic: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2014/07/01/facebook-experiment.html 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.
qu4z-2 12y ago
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!"
Houshalter 12y ago
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.
- rtpg 12y ago
  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.
  - Houshalter 12y ago
    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.

89 points by codelucas 12y ago

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.

spiralganglion 12y ago
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.
nemothekid 12y ago
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.
- DalekBaldwin 12y ago
  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.
SilasX 12y ago
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...

plorg 12y ago

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.

mijoharas 12y ago
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 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 http://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr [1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/262206/make_your_facebook_news_feed_default_to_most_recent.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/262206/make_your_facebook_new...

panarky 12y ago

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?

eridius 12y ago
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.
- panarky 12y ago
  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?
  - hyperpape 12y ago
    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.
- tedsanders 12y ago
  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.

tsycho 12y ago

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

qu4z-2 12y ago

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!"

Houshalter 12y ago

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.

rtpg 12y ago
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.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  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.