The Ethics of Randomization in Social Science Experiments

Over the past twenty years, randomized experiments have become increasingly common in the social sciences. They involve randomly assigning research participants to an experimental group or condition. While randomization can be a measure for improving data quality, it is also a means of distributing harms and benefits of those experimental conditions to research participants and their communities. This project will examine the question of when it is ethical to determine through random assignment which participants receive a given treatment in social science experiments. By seeking to answer this question, the project will generate new tools for social scientists who are considering randomized experiments. The goal of these tools is to offer greater protections to individuals and communities that are participants in research experiments. This project consists of three research objectives. First, a set of formal (mathematical) models will be developed to analyze the welfare consequences of random and non-random methods for research participant treatment assignment. While formalization is rare in the literature on the ethics of human subjects research, these models offer a new, more direct mapping between experimental design decisions regarding how treatment is assigned and the potential ethical implications of these decisions. The research team will create models that are informed by the expected harms and benefits to research participants. The second research objective is to measure anticipated benefits and harms of social science or policy interventions by adapting and field-testing methods that reveal prospective research participants’ expectations. This testing will occur in the context of two field experiments. The tools developed through the project will enable researchers to measure expected harms and benefits when designing experiments. The final research objective takes both tools, the formal models and the measures of expected harms and benefits, to create new pedagogical materials that incorporate ethics formally into experimental research design. This project is funded through the ER2 program by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.