A
Facebook study on users' emotions sparked soul-searching among researchers
and calls for better ethical guidelines in the online world.
"I
do think this whole incident will cause a lot of rethinking" about the
relationship between business and academic researchers, said
Susan T. Fiske,
the study's editor and a professor of psychology and public
affairs at Princeton University.
Researchers from Facebook and Cornell University manipulated the news feed of nearly 700,000 Facebook users for a week in 2012 to gauge whether emotions spread on social media.
They
found that users who saw more positive posts tended to write more
positive posts themselves, and vice versa. The study was published in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier in June, but sparked outrage after a blog post Friday said the study used Facebook users as "lab rats."
[...]
Jonathan Moreno,
a professor of medical ethics and health policy at University of
Pennsylvania, also criticized the study. "You are sending people whose
emotional state you don't know anything about communications that they
might find disturbing," Dr. Moreno said. "That might or might not be
something a research ethics board would worry about."
via The Wall Street Journal
Link to full article here.
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