Informed Consent: Studies in Judgment and Decision Making

This is an informed consent document that was used in previous studies and is not a current document. It is preserverd here for archival purposes to record the procedures used in published studies.

Before you decide to participate in these on-line studies, you should consider the following information:

• These studies pose no risks of which we are aware, beyond the normal risks of daily life in a nation that protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press. You can read each study before you decide whether or not to participate. These studies involve reading descriptions of situations and indicating what judgments you would make in those situations or what decisions you might make when presented a choice. These studies ask you to read, to think, and to press buttons on your computer to respond.
• If you consent to participate, it means that you are giving permission to scientists to analyze your data and to publish results of new discoveries that might be made based on their analyses.
• In publications of our research, we do not identify our participants, except in statistical form. The data are presented in a statistical format in which the identity of individual participants and their data are not revealed.
• Some studies may request your email address. It is NOT required that you enter your email address to participate. That is up to you. We use the email addresses strictly for the purpose of contacting prize winners. Yes. we do provide prizes of cash in some studies. If you do not enter your email address, then you cannot win a prize, but you can still participate and receive all other benefits of participation.
• We do not sell, exchange, or give email addresses or other personal information to anyone except as required by law (e.g., by lawful warrant issued by a judge). We do not sell, exchange, or give data to anyone with any other identifying information.
• Data may be shared with other scientists. Before data are made available to others, however, all identifiers (including email address, IP address, and comments) are deleted. As noted above, we do not sell, trade, or give away these addresses or other information that might conceivably be used to identify someone. Please do not make terrorist threats or other threats of violence, as we might be required in such cases to provide identifying information to the police.
• Data are sent in non-encrypted form with no more security than email. Therefore, you should respond as if you were sending email and use the same standards for communication with us as if you were sending email. You should be aware that email is not sent in encrypted (coded) form. Although unlikely, it is possible that the FBI or department of homeland security might be capturing the data transmission, for example.
• You can examine each study before you decide to participate. If you consent to participate, you are agreeing to the use of the data for scientific purposes, which may involve publication of scientific papers. To get an idea of how such studies are reported, see the publications listed at the bottom of this page.
• If you would like to review the format in which data might be provided to other scientists, please visit the [ARCHIVE-- a link was provided] where you can download data. As you will see if you examine the data sets, there is no way for any of this information to be identified with any particular participant.
• Students should be aware that all studies have been reviewed by Institutional Review Board and have been judged to be safe and satisfying regulations; however, you may decide for any reason that you do not want to participate in any particular study. There are many other studies in which you can participate; these opportunities are posted on the Sona-System computer. So, if you prefer not to participate in one or any of these studies, there are many other choices available to you. As stated in the syllabus for your class, there are also alternative assignments that do not involve participating in any experiments.
• Students who are doing experiments for credit toward a class assignment will not receive credit for cheating the assignment by randomly pushing buttons to speed through the task as fast as possible. The purpose of the assignment is to get you to think; we can give no credit for behavior that an instructor would identify as cheating the assignment. If you were hoping to get credit for such cheating, you should not even start these experiments because you will receive no credit for that behavior.

You can read each study and decide whether or not you want to participate.

If you decide to participate and to allow your data to be analyzed for research purposes, including possible publication in scientific journals, you can signal your agreement by pushing the button that sends the data in each study. However, if you decide that you do not want to participate, then you should not push the button that sends the data.

An agreement statement and a link to the research studies were provided here when this document was used. More recent informed consent documents are similar but have additional sections and some of the text included here has been revised.

References

• Birnbaum, M. H. (1999b). Testing critical properties of decision making on the Internet. Psychological Science, 10, 399-407.
• Birnbaum, M. H. (2000). Decision making in the lab and on the Web. In M. H. Birnbaum (Ed.), Psychological Experiments on the Internet. (pp. 3-34). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
• Birnbaum, M. H. (2001). A Web-based program of research on decision making. In U.-D. Reips & M. Bosnjak (Eds.), Dimensions of Internet Science (pp. 23-55). Lengerich, Germany: Pabst Science Publishers.
• Birnbaum, M. H. (2004a). Causes of common consequence paradoxes: An experimental dissection. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 48, 87-106.
• Birnbaum, M. H. (2004b). Testing decision theories in gambles expressed as natural frequencies: Stochastic dominance, event-splitting, and cumulative independence. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 95, 40-65.
• Birnbaum, M. H. (2005a). Three new tests of independence that differentiate models of risky decision making. Management Science, 51, 1346-1358.