[eridius]

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.

[jessriedel]

You're not explaining the inconsistency, you're just giving it a name. If someone says "why are the sentences for crack cocaine 5 times longer than for regular cocaine?", it's silly to answer "because these are the rules we have, and they were passed by official people".

[eridius]

That's really quite a terrible and completely irrelevant analogy. It's not that the rules are different, it's that we have rules, period, for experiments. There are no ethical rules for advertising. There are rules about lying, but that's basically it. But experiments? Yeah, we have ethical rules for those, and Facebook seems to have deliberately ignored them.

[SilasX]

You're simply repeating the same error that the GP criticized. Yes, we call the first situation A, and the second, B; and B has [more] rules, while A does not. (A = advertising, B = a Real Experiment)

Great, but why? What it is about B that justifies the different ethical/legal criteria? Surely it's not the fact that eridius applied the label "experiment" to one and not the other?

How can it make sense to say that doing X is ethical "as long as you're just trying to make money, not publish scientific results"? Presumably, certain things are just wrong to do for whatever reason, and that is why scientific bodies user their publishing standards to prevent them from happening. Those reasons are surely just as applicable in other contexts; if scientific bodies don't have rules for those cases, its because they have no influence there, not because they think it's hunky-dory outside the lab!

"Well, yeah, MegaCorp burned people alive, but it's okay because they were just trying to make money, not publish results on human flammability."

How many more different ways can commenters make the above point, so that people will stop replying that "what advertisers do is not a Real Experiment, so they deserve a lesser standard"? That's a restatement of the inconsistency, not a resolution of it.

[aianus]

What about ad companies running different ads in different markets and analyzing the resulting sales data? Isn't that an experiment?

[semanticist]

Not in the sense the OP means. They mean in the sense of a scientific experiment being done nominally to advance our understanding of the world (or in the case of psychology, specifically the mind and our perception of the world), vetted by a review board, and published in a peer-reviewed journal as part of the academic process.

This is very different from the colloquial use of 'experiment' to talk about an A/B test or similar. It's a very specific context where we have very specific rules in order to prevent people from committing horrendous acts in the name of obtaining greater understanding.

[click170]

I would postulate it's because people feel uncomfortable in situations where they are made to feel like lab rats, and that as a society we decided that these rules should be in place so that people who do not have the same views do not abuse those of us who do.

[Sami_Lehtinen]

Such experiments are run all the time on large populations. So that's nothing new. It's interesting to see what views there will be about this time after decades. X-ray show fitting matchines? Radiation pills to cure everything? Will aspartamine be allowed in food products after 50 years? Will it be allowed only because it was allowed earlier, even if it's known (then) to be dangerous? What about mobile phones and radiation? Is it ok to have 2w microwave trasmitter attached to your head all day long? Etc. Why is alcohol and nicotine still allowed to be sold, even if known to be toxic and damaging to health. What about acetylsalicylic acid as analgesic, and list goes on. Margarines were really popular at one time, and adverticed as healtyh option to butter.

[panarky]

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]

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]

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.

[SilasX]

I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to say "X is wrong, unless you're doing it for a psychological experiment".

You should be at least as much worried about "manipulating human behavior for profit" as you are about "manipulating human behavior in order to publish the most effective ways of doing so"; otherwise, you're just letting yourself get tripped up by the labels.