Complementing the broader project of treating human subjects research regulation (including “informed consent”) as an ethnographic object, this article scrutinizes the category research: that about which research subjects may (in some way) be informed, to which they may (or may not) consent, and in which they may (variously) participate. What is “research”? When does it begin and end? What is t...

Does the fact that deception is widely practised - even though there is a general prohibition against deception - provide insight into the ethics of deceptive methods in research, especially for social-behavioral research? I answer in the affirmative. The ubiquity of deception argument, as I will call it, points to the need for a concrete and nuanced understanding of the variety of deceptive pr...

Ethicists argue that deception is unacceptable, whereas researchers regard it as a necessary part of (certain kinds of) research. This impasse could be resolved by establishing the specific conditions under which deception in medical and behavioral research can be tolerated. An approach based on a consideration of the "Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct," one of the few wri...

1. Sociocultural Behavior Understanding From the intelligence analyst in the command center identifying deviations from typical patterns of life to the small unit leader on the ground negotiating with a village elder, the ability to understand sociocultural behavior is vital for achieving mission success. According to Schmorrow (2011), accurate analysis of sociocultural behavior requires a “tho...

The Internet offers many new opportunities for behavioral researchers to conduct quantitative and qualitative research. Although the ethical guidelines of the American Psychological Association generalize, in part, to research conducted through the Internet, several matters related to Internet research require further analysis. This article reviews several fundamental ethical issues related to ...

Human beings are critical to the functioning of the vast majority of operating systems, influencing both the way these systems work and how they perform. Yet most formal analytical models of operations assume that the people who participate in operating systems are fully rational or at least can be induced to behave rationally. Many other disciplines, including economics, finance, and marketing...