ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Objecting to experiments that compare two unobjectionable policies or treatments.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Aversion to pragmatic randomised controlled trials: three survey experiments with clinicians and laypeople in the USA.BMJ open · 2024Article
- Reply to Vogt et al.: What does it mean that a phenomenon generalizes?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Experiment aversion does generalize, but it can also be mitigated.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Reply to Bas et al.: The difference between a genuine tendency and a context-specific response.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- No evidence that experiment aversion is not a robust empirical phenomenon.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Experiment aversion does not appear to generalize.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- An Overview of Innovative Approaches to Support Timely and Agile Health Communication Research and Practice.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Review
- Place-based interventions and the epidemiology of violence prevention.Current epidemiology reports · 2022Article
- Clinical deployment environments: Five pillars of translational machine learning for health.Frontiers in digital health · 2022Review
- Protecting the public from the adverse effects of confused research ethics.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2021Article
- Zelen design clinical trials: why, when, and how.Trials · 2021Review
- So Useful as a Good Theory? The Practicality Crisis in (Social) Psychological Theory.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2021Article
- On the role of statisticians and modelers in responding to AIDS and COVID-19.Statistics in medicine · 2021Article
- Objecting to experiments even while approving of the policies or treatments they compare.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Revising ethical guidance for the evaluation of programmes and interventions not initiated by researchers.Journal of medical ethics · 2020Article
- Reply to Mislavsky et al.: Sometimes people really are averse to experiments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- The minimum mean paradox: A mechanical explanation for apparent experiment aversion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Creating Safe And Healthy Neighborhoods With Place-Based Violence Interventions.Health affairs (Project Hope) · 2019Observational
- Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries.Frontiers in big data · 2019Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Randomized experiments have enormous potential to improve human welfare in many domains, including healthcare, education, finance, and public policy. However, such "A/B tests" are often criticized on ethical grounds even as similar, untested interventions are implemented without objection. We find robust evidence across 16 studies of 5,873 participants from three diverse populations spanning nine domains-from healthcare to autonomous vehicle design to poverty reduction-that people frequently rate A/B tests designed to establish the comparative effectiveness of two policies or treatments as inappropriate even when universally implementing either A or B, untested, is seen as appropriate. This "A/B effect" is as strong among those with higher educational attainment and science literacy and among relevant professionals. It persists even when there is no reason to prefer A to B and even when recipients are treated unequally and randomly in all conditions (A, B, and A/B). Several remaining explanations for the effect-a belief that consent is required to impose a policy on half of a population but not on the entire population; an aversion to controlled but not to uncontrolled experiments; and a proxy form of the illusion of knowledge (according to which randomized evaluations are unnecessary because experts already do or should know "what works")-appear to contribute to the effect, but none dominates or fully accounts for it. We conclude that rigorously evaluating policies or treatments via pragmatic randomized trials may provoke greater objection than simply implementing those same policies or treatments untested.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.