The Guinea Pig Problem

About this Episode

With Michelle Meyer, a scholar of bioethics and law and a longtime listener of this show, we talk about human testing and Facebook. There’s a lot to talk about, but it doesn’t dissuade us from our customary, introductory nonsense, this time including a gift from listener Michelle, Star Wars, Joe’s mangling of last names, and Joe — and this actually happened — eating dog food. If you hate fun and want to get right to the colloquium part of America’s Faculty Colloquium, it starts a little after 23 minutes in. Should corporations be able to experiment on its customers and employees without their consent? Don’t they all do that, and haven’t they always? Don’t we all do that? Does it matter whether Facebook is more like a burrito stand or a utility? Mmmm… burritos.

This show’s links:

• Michelle Meyer’s web page, faculty profile, and writing
• America’s Team
• The excellent Phantom Menace poster
• Vindu Goel, Facebook Tinkers with Users’ Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry
• Christian Sandvig, Karrie Karahalios, and Cedric Langbort, Uncovering Algorithms: Looking Inside the Facebook News Feed
• Michelle Meyer, Everything You Need to Know about Facebook’s Controversial Emotion Experiment (Wired)
• About social comparison theory and emotional contagion
• Adam Kramer, Jamie Guillory, and Jeffrey Hancock, Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks
• The Belmont Report
• The Common Rule
• Michelle Meyer and Christopher Chabris, Please, Corporations, Experiment on Us (N.Y. Times)
• James Grimmelmann, Illegal, Immoral, and Mood-Altering (Medium)
• Michelle Meyer et al., Misjudgements Will Drive Social Trials Underground (Nature)
• Michelle Meyer, Two Cheers for Corporate Experimentation: The A/B Illusion and the Virtues of Data-Driven Innovation
• Michele Meyer, More on the A/B Illusion: IRB Review, Debriefing, Power Asymmetries and a Challenge for Critics