Thursday, December 11, 2003
In Protest of Neuromarketing and in Support of Strong IRB's
Commercial Alert Asks Emory University to Halt Neuromarketing Experiments
Occasionally I gripe about having to write an Institutional Review Board protocol for allowing my research to continue. Most of the time it seems like the reviewers are more interested that all the T's are dotted and the I's are crossed.
IRB's, and the national system of Protection for Human Subjects that enforces these protections, came about largely as a result of abuses of human subjects for research purposes in Nazi Germany during WW2, the Tuskeegee Syphilis study, Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiment, Watson's LIttle Albert study, and others.
These studies serve as potent reminders of the need for IRB's to protect people from the unhindered pursuit of knowledge, without ethics. But these are problems of the past, right? Nothing like that could happen now, right?
Well, the article above demonstrates otherwise. Neuroscientists and psychiatrists at Emory are studying neurophysiological concomitants of buying behavior, essentially looking for the neurobehavioral "buy button". Now at first this didn't seem like a bad idea to me; I had a neutral response to this. But after reading the letter that several psychologists sent to Emory in protest of using federal funds and university property (a la corporate welfare) to benefit an indidious company called the Brighthouse Institute for Thought Sciences (sounds creepy, like the junked "Total Information Awareness" department idea), I've decided that this represents a failure of the IRB--and we see the benefit of the IRB overall.
So I take back all the bad things I said about IRB's. They are truly necessary and a benefit to mankind and science.
"The real risk of neuromarketing research is to the people – including children – who are the real targets of this research. Already, marketing is deeply implicated in a host of pathologies. The nation is in the midst of an epidemic of marketing-related diseases. Our children are suffering from extraordinary levels of obesity, type 2 diabetes, anorexia, bulimia, and pathological gambling, while millions will eventually die from the marketing of tobacco. Such illnesses affect also the population at large, as does chronic debt that people incur to support the consumption that the marketing industry encourages."
Occasionally I gripe about having to write an Institutional Review Board protocol for allowing my research to continue. Most of the time it seems like the reviewers are more interested that all the T's are dotted and the I's are crossed.
IRB's, and the national system of Protection for Human Subjects that enforces these protections, came about largely as a result of abuses of human subjects for research purposes in Nazi Germany during WW2, the Tuskeegee Syphilis study, Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiment, Watson's LIttle Albert study, and others.
These studies serve as potent reminders of the need for IRB's to protect people from the unhindered pursuit of knowledge, without ethics. But these are problems of the past, right? Nothing like that could happen now, right?
Well, the article above demonstrates otherwise. Neuroscientists and psychiatrists at Emory are studying neurophysiological concomitants of buying behavior, essentially looking for the neurobehavioral "buy button". Now at first this didn't seem like a bad idea to me; I had a neutral response to this. But after reading the letter that several psychologists sent to Emory in protest of using federal funds and university property (a la corporate welfare) to benefit an indidious company called the Brighthouse Institute for Thought Sciences (sounds creepy, like the junked "Total Information Awareness" department idea), I've decided that this represents a failure of the IRB--and we see the benefit of the IRB overall.
So I take back all the bad things I said about IRB's. They are truly necessary and a benefit to mankind and science.
"The real risk of neuromarketing research is to the people – including children – who are the real targets of this research. Already, marketing is deeply implicated in a host of pathologies. The nation is in the midst of an epidemic of marketing-related diseases. Our children are suffering from extraordinary levels of obesity, type 2 diabetes, anorexia, bulimia, and pathological gambling, while millions will eventually die from the marketing of tobacco. Such illnesses affect also the population at large, as does chronic debt that people incur to support the consumption that the marketing industry encourages."
