Social Psychology Special Issue

Tommy van Steen
children’s choices about buying a healthy or
unhealthy lunch. To paraphrase their
reasoning; once we know that the order in
which we offer snacks influences behaviour,
there is no ‘neutral’ option anymore,
whichever order of the snacks is chosen, it
will always influence what children buy and
we cannot pretend that we do not know this.
This example serves to highlight the
differences between approaches by
academics and industry even further.
Academics carrying out this research could
focus on questions such as ‘Does the order in
which we present snacks influence which
snacks children buy?’, or, ‘How can we make
children choose a healthy snack?’; while the
same study carried out by a school cafeteria
might ask ‘How do we get children to buy
the products with the highest margins?’ And
in this example, these products with the
highest margins might be the exact same
unhealthy snacks that an academic might
want children to avoid.
Returning to the Facebook study, the
social networking site might be interested in
seeing what makes users stay on the platform
for longer periods of time, but what would
they do if it turned out that reading negative
status updates did just that? And similarly,
where ethical guidelines would suggest that
participants who are primed with negative
moods should get some treatment to reduce
the effect as part of the debriefing process,
can we expect the same procedure when
companies collect data for reasons that are
different from those of academics?
In conclusion, the shift from lab studies
to large-scale field studies (the Facebook
study had a total of 689,003 participants) is
laudable. And given the increasing amount
of data that some companies possess or have
access to in a short timespan, this application
of big data to conduct research is likely to
become more popular as collaborations
between companies and academia
strengthen. However, the issue that remains
is that a company like Facebook can conduct
this type of research without having to
adhere to any guidelines. So where should
the responsibility lie when industry and
academia collaborate on research projects?
While I do not have a definite answer, a solution
could lie in focusing on the main reason
for conducting the research; is it the
academic who proposes a collaboration with
a company so they can collect data that
would be unobtainable otherwise, or is it the
company that needs the academic’s
expertise in a certain field to help them
investigate their target group? I would say
that as long as there is a lack of adherence to
universal ethical guidelines by companies,
whenever academics instigate the collaboration,
they should apply for ethical approval
by their own ethics committee, regardless of
which terms and conditions users of the
company’s services have agreed to in the
past. In other situations, the need for ethical
approval by the academics’ institution(s)
might be less likely, but as stated by the
Code of Human Research Ethics (BPS, 2010,
p.4) ‘thinking is not optional.’
Correspondence
Tommy van Steen
PhD Student,
Centre for the Study of Behavioural Change
and Influence,
University of the West of England.
Email: Tommy3.vansteen@live.uwe.ac.uk
References
British Psychological Society (BPS) (2010). Code of human
research ethics. Leicester: BPS. Retrieved from:
http://www.bps.org.uk/sites/default/files/
documents/code_of_human_research_ethics.pdf
Kramer, A.D.I., Guillory, J.E. & Hancock, J.T. (2014). Experimental
evidence of massive scale emotional contagion
through social networks. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788–8790.
doi:10.1073/pnas.1412469111
Milgram, S., Bickman, L. & Berkowitz, L. (1969). Note on the
drawing power of crowds of different size. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology. doi:10.1037/h0028070
Thaler, R.H. & Sunstein, C.R. (2008). Nudge. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Verma, I.M. (2014). Editorial expression of concern: Experimental
evidence of massive scale emotional contagion
through social networks. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(29),
10779. doi:10.1073/pnas.1412469111
28 PsyPAG Quarterly