Ethics

I'm neither an ethicist nor am I much of an experimentalist. So why did I start writing about and working in the area of research ethics?

Starting around 2010, when serving on NSF panels I noticed an increasing number of aggressive social science experiments, sometimes conducted in high-risk settings without informed consent. I started asking questions, and NSF visiting staff member (and WVU professor and distinguished chair Erik Herron ) encouraged me to investigate these questions. This led to an NSF funded conference at UCSD in 2013, gathering experimentalists and some ethicists and practitioners to discuss emerging ethical issues. Attendees and program are [here]. The outcome of the conference was my edited volume on these issues: Ethics and Experiments: Problems and Solutions for Social Scientists and Policy Professionals. .

A few years later, then-president of APSA David Lake asked me to co-chair an ad-hoc committee on human subjects research, with Trisha Phillips of WVU. Our committee, representing diverse research approaches spent the next 3+ years developing a set of Principles to support ethical research practices by political scientists, along with supporting Guidance documents. After input form membership and from APSA ethics committee, were adopted by APSA in spring 2020. Details on the committee charge, membership, report, and final Principles, and Guidance can be found here.

Along the way, I've published a few other pieces on research ethics, including:

• Scott Desposato. The Ethical Challenges of Political Science Field Experiments. In Anna S. Iltis and Douglas P. MacKay, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Research Ethics, Oxford Handbooks Online. Oxford University Press, Forthcoming

• Scott Desposato. Public Impacts from Elite Audit Experiments: Aggregate and Response Delay Harms. Political Studies Review, Forthcoming

• Daniel Butler and Scott Desposato. Proposing a Compensation Requirement for Audit Studies. Political Studies Review, Forthcoming

• Scott Desposato. Subjects’ and Scholars’ Views on the Ethics of Political Science Field Experiments. Perspectives on Politics, 2018

• A note for the Comparative Politics Newsletter

• A guest post at Political Violence at a Glance

• And I'm working on a grant application to support additional research in this area.

My own thoughts on ethics? There are few absolutes or black and white issues, but we can all avoid problems by being thoughtful about possible consequences of our research and respectful of our subjects' autonomy and opinions, and transparent about our efforts to be ethical.

My core recommendations for scholars conducting field experiments:

1. Tread lightly: don't maximize size or impact

2. Do good: make sure treatments and expected impacts are unambiguously good - or at least not harmful!

3. Confess: debrief (directly or indirectly) unconsenting subjects after completing the study.

4. Compensate: pay unconsenting subjects (directly or indirectly) after completing the study