Methodological and Ethical Issues in Conducting Social Psychology Research via the Internet

When I set out to recruit highly educated people with specialized training in decision making, I anticipated that it would be a difficult project. The reason I wanted to study this group was that I had been obtaining some very startling results in decision-making experiments with undergraduates (Birnbaum & Navarrete, 1998; Birnbaum, Patton, & Lott, 1999). Undergraduates were systematically violating stochastic dominance, a principle that was considered both rational and descriptive, according to cumulative prospect theory and rank dependent expected utility theory, the most widely accepted theories of decision making at the time (Luce & Fishburn, 1991; Quiggin, 1993; Tversky & Kahneman, 1992). These theories were recognized in the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics shared by Daniel Kahneman, so these systematic violations required substantial changes in thinking about decision making. The results were not totally unexpected, for they had been predicted by my configural weight models of decision making (Birnbaum, 1997). Nevertheless, I anticipated the challenge that my results might apply only to people who lack the education required to understand the task. I wanted to see if the results I obtained with undergraduates would hold up with people highly trained in decision making, who do not want to be caught behaving badly with respect to rational principles. From my previous experiences in research with special populations, I was aware of the difficulties of such research. In previous work, my students and I had printed and mailed materials to targeted participants C H A P T E R