[zaroth]

Would it be OK to just try to positively influence a visitor's mental state? What about negatively influencing your opinion about something? What about making you feel scared a particular event might happen to you? What about making you feel like you need a pick-me-up?

...What about enticing the maximum number of people to click on your buttons for the maximum amount of time, with no purpose but capturing their eyeballs?

[jamesbrownuhh]

Most of those are quite different things, and obviously so if you think about them.

"Do customers prefer the green button or the blue button" is harmless. Psychological testing is NOT harmless and NOT something that anyone with a website can or should do. That is medical research - and as such is strictly controlled precisely because of the real risks and genuine human cost that it can have if conducted inexpertly.

[akerl_]

> "Do customers prefer the green button or the blue button" is harmless.

That is a psychological test.

[jamesbrownuhh]

Not one which is specifically designed to alter someone's emotional mental state. The difference is quite obvious, surely.

[zaroth]

Actually, no. You are putting the cart before the horse. What actually happened is that they tweaked the ranking algorithm, and then measured a minuscule effect in a particular scoring algorithm (in this case counting certain types of words used in future posts).

So the nature of the scoring algorithm (counting emotional words) used to measure the impact of a change makes deploying the A/B test suddenly unethical?

[vacri]

Most advertising is specifically designed to alter someone's emotional mental state, and plenty of that is in a negative direction. Would you also outlaw advertising? Why should advertising get a free pass and not well-controlled psych testing? What about signs warning you not to infringe on [random local law] under threat of penalty? They create a sense of oppression. Should they be forbidden?