Some social scientists are tired of asking for permission

If you took Psychology 101 in college, you probably had to enroll in an experiment to fulfill a course requirement or to get extra credit. Students are the usual subjects in social science research—made to play games, fill out questionnaires,look at pictures and otherwise provide data points for their professors’ investigations into human behavior, cognition and perception.

But who gets to decide whether the experimental protocol—what subjects are asked to do and disclose—is appropriate and ethical? That question has been roi ling the academic community since the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Human Research Protections revised its rulesinJanuary.

The revision exempts from oversight studies involving “benign behavioral interventions.” This was welcome news to economists, psychologists and sociologists who have long complained that they need not receive as much scrutiny as, say, a medical researcher.

The change received little notice until a March opinion article in The Chronicle of Higher Education went viral. The authors of the article, a professor of human development and a professor of psychology, interpreted the revision as a license to conduct research without submitting it for approval by an institutional reviewboard.

That is, social science researchersought to be able to decide on their own whether or not their studies are harmful to human subjects.

The Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (known as the Common Rule) was published in 1991 after along history of exploitation of human subjects in federally funded research—notably, the Tuskegeesyphilis study and a series of radiation experiments that took place over three decades after WorldWarII.

The remedial policy mandated that all institutions, academic or otherwise, establish are view board to ensure that federally funded researchers conducted ethicalstudies.

“One of the problems with the regulations is not every case is a difficult case and needs to goto an I RB ,” said Zachary Sch rag, professor of history at George Mason University and author of “Ethical Imperialism ,” about an institutional review board.

The problem is that the Office for Human Research Protections, in its revised rules, did not specify exactly who gets to determine what is and is not a benign behavioral intervention. Although there is a suggestion that someone other than the researcher should make that call, the office does not mandateit.

“Researchers tend to under estimate the risk of activities that they are very comfortable with ,” particularly when conducting experiments and publishing the results is critical to thetheir careers, said Tracy Ar wood, assistant vice president for research compliance at Clemson University.

A previous version of the revised Common Rule, which prompted more than 2,100 comments, called for a web-based that researchers could use to determine whether their research was exempt. But such a tool, which many thought left too much to the individualpersonal judgment, did not make it into the final rule.

A vocal proponent of role of institutional review boards is Richard N is bett, professor of psychology at the University ofMichiganandco-authorofthe opinion piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Social science researchers are perfectly capable of making their own determinations about the potential harm of their research protocols, he said. A behavioral intervention is benign, he said, if it is the sort of thing that goes on in everydaylife.

“There’ s no such thing as asking a question of a normal human being that should be reviewed by an I RB, because someone can just say ,‘ To heck with you ,’” N is bett said.

His own research, he said, involves“showing people a fish tank and asking them what they saw .” Hardly the stuff of emotional trauma,hethinks.

But research subjects, many of them students, may not feel like

they can just walk away from a teacher’ s experiment. Recall the Mil gram study at Yale, in which visibly distraught subjects obeyed orders to administer what they thought were electric shocks to yelpingactors.

A decade later, int he1970s, there was the Stanford prison experiment, in which arbitrarily labeling student subjects prisonersor guards quickly led to“Lord of the Flies” type cruelty.

And then there was there search that involved humiliating and emotionally tormenting 22 undergraduate sat Harvard University over three years starting in 1959.( One of those students was a young TedKaczynski,w ho later became the Una bomber .)

N is bet t countered that those examples were outliers. And in the case of the Mil gram study, he said ,“I think it should definitely have been approved even if people would have known that it was going to cause substantial psychic pa into some subjects, because the knowledge gain is precious .”

Already at many universities, researchers who think their minimal risk to subjects need only get a sign off from areview board staff member. They do not have to submit their proposals for approval by the full review board—usuallymadeupof colleagues, at least one member of the community and sometimes also students.

Ultimately, review board administrators and board members said the revised federal rules were a baseline for oversight, and they must determine what was appropriate for their institutions. But they are feeling increased pressure from resident researchers who, like N is bett, think that the revised federal rules now allow self regulation.

“There seems to be a major paradigm shift going on away from the original goal of the I RB to protect human subjects and toward the convenience of researchers in the name of so-called efficiency,” said Tom George, a lawyer and b io ethicist who serve son the institutional review board at the University of Texas at Austin .“I find that of deep concern .”

Not all researchers are pushing for diminished review boardMany said they appreciatedit.

Besides, added Nathaniel H err, an assistant professor of American University ,“It just takes one scandal to make people doubt all research and not want to participate, which would harm the whole field .”