Ethics in field experimentation: A call to establish new standards to protect the public from unwanted manipulation and real harms
Ethics in field experimentation: A call to establish new standards to protect the public from unwanted manipulation and real harms
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.2012021117
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发表时间：
2020-12-01
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Hatemi, Peter K.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
McDermott, Rose;Hatemi, Peter K.
1966 年，亨利·比彻 (Henry Beecher) 发表了他的基础论文《伦理与临床研究》，揭露了顶尖大学和政府机构经常进行的不道德实验。一个共同的主题是缺乏自愿同意。在他工作之后，围绕实验室实验的研究法规蓬勃发展。半个多世纪后，我们寻求追随他的脚步，确定公众面临的新风险领域：某些类型的现场实验。自贝尔蒙特报告发布以来，实验研究的性质发生了巨大变化。部分由于包括社交媒体在内的技术进步，实验者现在瞄准并影响整个社会，向生活中的公众发布干预措施，而往往没有充分的审查或控制。大量社会科学领域实验并不符合当前人类参与者研究的伦理和法律要求。现实世界的干预措施是在未经其影响的公众同意或通知的情况下进行的。通常不会对实验者伤害的人群进行后续跟踪和汇报。重要的是，即使遵循伦理研究指南，研究人员也遵循在受控环境中进行实验所制定的原则，而对个人所处的更广泛的社会几乎没有进行评估或保护。我们致力于通过倡导创建新的规范来提高未来工作的道德规范，说明学者们似乎没有认识到此类研究通过将人们（包括那些被操纵群体之外的人）置于危险之中而规避道德标准的实地实验类别。
In 1966, Henry Beecher published his foundational paper "Ethics and Clinical Research," bringing to light unethical experiments that were routinely being conducted by leading universities and government agencies. A common theme was the lack of voluntary consent. Research regulations surrounding laboratory experiments flourished after his work. More than half a century later, we seek to follow in his footsteps and identify a new domain of risk to the public: certain types of field experiments. The nature of experimental research has changed greatly since the Belmont Report. Due in part to technological advances including social media, experimenters now target and affect whole societies, releasing interventions into a living public, often without sufficient review or controls. A large number of social science field experiments do not reflect compliance with current ethical and legal requirements that govern research with human participants. Real-world interventions are being conducted without consent or notice to the public they affect. Follow-ups and debriefing are routinely not being undertaken with the populations that experimenters injure. Importantly, even when ethical research guidelines are followed, researchers are following principles developed for experiments in controlled settings, with little assessment or protection for the wider societies within which individuals are embedded. We strive to improve the ethics of future work by advocating the creation of new norms, illustrating classes of field experiments where scholars do not appear to have recognized the ways such research circumvents ethical standards by putting people, including those outside the manipulated group, into harm's way.