Best Practices for Ethical Conduct of Misinformation Research

Abstract

Abstract. Misinformation can have noxious impacts on cognition, fostering the formation of false beliefs, retroactively distorting memory for events, and influencing reasoning and decision-making even after it has been credibly corrected. Researchers investigating the impacts of real-world misinformation are therefore faced with an ethical issue: they must consider the immediate and long-term consequences of exposing participants to false claims. In this paper, we first present an overview of the ethical risks associated with real-world misinformation. We then report results from a scoping review of ethical practices in misinformation research. We investigated (1) the extent to which researchers report the details of their ethical practices, including issues of informed consent and debriefing, and (2) the specific steps that researchers report taking to protect participants from the consequences of misinformation exposure. We found that fewer than 30% of misinformation papers report any debriefing, and almost no authors assessed the effectiveness of their debriefing procedure. Building on the findings from this review, we evaluate the balance of risk versus reward currently operating in this field and propose a set of guidelines for best practices. Our ultimate goal is to allow researchers the freedom to investigate questions of considerable scientific and societal impact while meeting their ethical obligations to participants.

Informed Consent and Debriefing When Deceiving Participants: A Systematic Review of Research Ethics Guidelines

“…There were significant disagreements with regards to the content of debriefing beyond disclosure of the deception and study purpose, as well as regarding the timing of the debriefing. While guidelines mention specific types of content (e.g., information about the study purpose, the study value), the academic literature tends to discuss more structural and communicative features of the provided information (e.g., precision and extent of the information, relevance to the participants, providing sources of the information, letting information sink in gradually, communicating non-authoritatively) (Greene et al, 2022; Miketta & Friese, 2019). Additional kinds of specific information that could be given may include explaining to participants why they formed and/or acted upon their false beliefs and what the consequences of the belief might be (Greenspan & Loftus, 2021).…”

“…For instance, a possible problem is that, similar to informed consent, people might not always completely read debriefing texts (Douglas et al, 2021; McCambridge et al, 2012). Ensuring sufficient engagement, repeating the debriefing and testing participants’ understanding of the debriefing might help to effectively debunk the false belief (Greene et al, 2022).…”

“…Although there has been some concerted effort to flesh out specific ways to implement consent in studies that use deception, in general the current literature is inconclusive or insufficient to concretely guide the implementation of consent and debriefing procedures. Moreover, inconsistent as well as inflexible applications of normative rules in the ethics review, a lack of a priori guidance for researchers and an inconsistent implementation of debriefing have been reported for this kind of research (Brody et al, 2000; Ceci et al, 1985; Greene et al, 2022; Kimmel et al, 2011; Traianou, 2019; Verhaeghe, 2022). In a similar vein, normative documents that comment on the use of deception in research have been criticized for being ambivalent or vague about it and for offering little assistance on how to assess its acceptability (Kimmel et al, 2011; Pittenger, 2002).…”

Psychological Research on Misinformation

“…Greene et al (2023) present an overview of the ethical challenges that misinformation brings with it. Their review of ethical practices in misinformation research shows that the majority of papers in the field do not report adequate details on ethical considerations in general, and debriefing procedures in particular.…”

“…A second criterion was that I asked authors to approach their specific topic with a focus on integration, implications, and solutionsor in short, provide a futureoriented perspective. Greene et al (2023) present an overview of the ethical challenges that misinformation brings with it. Their review of ethical practices in misinformation research shows that the majority of papers in the field do not report adequate details on ethical considerations in general, and debriefing procedures in particular.…”