Thread by @robreich

Another chapter in ethics of field experiments in social science:

American economists and political scientists at @UChicago, @Stanford, @MIT and @Harvard randomly incentivize young Hong Kong university students to engage in antiauthoritarian protests.

https://twitter.com/DurRobert/status/1148090885470654464

I wouldn't call this an amazing design. I'd say it raises a lot of uncomfortable questions, both social scientific and geopolitical.

@SheenaGreitens has a good set of initial questions:
twitter.com/SheenaGreitens

The experimenters don't pay people to protest in the streets, but they pay people conditional on behavior that occurs during protesting in the streets.

And the experiment appears to have passed IRB processes at @stanford, @UCBerkeley, and elsewhere!

I'll add a few more concerns:

1. Were some students put in harm's way because of fiscal incentives for protesting?

2. Were students identified via facial recognition and added to Chinese or other databases?

3. Might the US State Department be interested in this?

The scholars appear to acknowledge the risks they were taking, or more precisely, asking their subjects to take:

Will there be a discussion in the journal that publishes this of the ethics involved?

Adding one of the authors to this thread, will hope for a reply. @david_yang