the era of corporate psychological experimentation

by Daniel LaPonsie at Psychology Punk

Facebook decided to use its own user base for a study, again!, as reported earlier this month. In a nutshell, what they did was they crashed their own app and monitored user behavior. They found that when the app crashed, users simply opened the mobile browser and logged into the site that way. An article at Wired says “people never stopped coming back.”

This ins’t the first behavioral study conducted by Facebook on its own user base. A full-blown psychological study, which produced an article that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science caused a major fuss in 2014. The upset was largely due to the fact that Facebook was experimenting on huge numbers of people without any sort of knowledge or consent. (In my opinion, they did much the same thing with this latest study.)

The 2014 report detailed how Facebook tweaked the emotions of its users by hiding certain posts so that some users had a feed that presented almost entirely happy or pleasant status updates, while others saw negative. People at Facebook then monitored differences in activity in the users. They found that people who were being hit with negative status updates were noticeably less engaged.

Incidentally, the emotion-tweaking experiment was done in 2012. It took a few years for the report itself to get through the review process and finally get published. Afterward, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg apologized for experimenting on the user base …sort of. And then later in the summer of 2014, it came out that OKCupid ran experiments on its own paying customers.

where’s the oversight?

So this brings me to the observation that we’ve entered an era of psychological studies being done by corporations. Yes, businesses do tests on customers. They always have. But, here we have social media companies running social psych experiments, one of which was published in a science journal. This kind of thing is typically the domain of universities.

However, academia found out the hard way that there’s a need to put measures in place to safeguard ethics, safety, and basic human decency. It doesn’t make sense to wait until similar disasters befall Facebook-like studies over social media. Let’s not turn those social media users into unwitting victims.

share your thoughts

It’s likely that you are a Facebook user, and probably use other social media as well, so what are your thoughts on this? Please drop your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below or at my blog, psychologypunk.com.