By Winston Chiong, MD, PhD, a UCSF-CTSI K Scholar and assistant professor at the Memory and Aging Center, originally posted at KevinMD.com
I’m simultaneously a behavioral researcher, an ethicist, and a hopeless Facebook addict, so I’ve been thinking a lot about a recent controversial study in which researchers manipulated the emotional content of 689,003 Facebook users’ news feeds. In summary, users who saw fewer of their friends’ posts expressing negative emotions went on to express more positive and fewer negative emotions in their own posts, while users who saw fewer posts expressing positive emotions went on to express more negative and fewer positive emotions in their posts.
This provides evidence for “emotional contagion” through online social networks — that we feel better when exposed to other people’s positive emotions, and worse when exposed to negative emotions. This finding isn’t obvious, since some have suggested that seeing other people’s positive posts might make us feel worse if our own lives seem duller or sadder in comparison.
The journal and authors clearly did not anticipate a wave of online criticism condemning the study as unethical. (Full disclosure: one of the authors is also a researcher at UCSF, though I don’t think I’ve ever met her.) In particular, the authors claimed that participants agreed to Facebook’s Data Use Policy when they created their Facebook accounts, and this constituted informed consent to research. Looking at the Common Rule governing research on human subjects, it’s clear that the requirements of informed consent (including a description of the purposes of the research, expected duration, risks/benefits, compensation for harms) are not met just because subjects click “agree” to this sort of blanket terms of use. There are exceptions to these requirements, and some people have suggested that the research could have qualified for a waiver of informed consent if the researchers had applied for one. I’m not so sure about that argument, and in any case the researchers hadn’t.
While the online discussion about this study has been fascinating, I think there are a few points that haven’t received as much attention as I think they deserve. . .
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