Research and expert commentary on digital technologies in public life
Last semester, I taught a Princeton undergrad/grad seminar on the craft, politics, and ethics of behavioral experimentation. The idea was simple: since large-scale human subjects research is now common outside universities, we need to equip students to make sense of that kind of power and think critically about it.
In this post, I share lessons for teaching a class like this and how I’m thinking about next year.
Path diagram from SOC412 lecture on the Social Media Color Experiment
How can we manage the politics and ethics of large-scale online behavioral research? When this question came up in April during a forum on Defending Democracy at Princeton, Ed Felten mentioned on stage that I was teaching a Princeton undergrad class on this very topic. No pressure!
Ed was right about the need: people with undergrad computer science degrees routinely conduct large-scale behavioral experiments affecting millions or billions of people. Since large-scale human subjects research is now common, universities need to equip students to make sense of and think critically about that kind of power.
