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> The ones who study psychology because it's a female dominated study and all those psych students need their credit and 'participating' in research is part of it.

Wait, does participating in a study as a subject count for credit, or does working on a study count?

Aren't studies explicit about the demographics of their participants? And don't studies that make generalized claims usually control for things like gender and age?

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It's common practice in psychology degrees to have some of your ungraded but required credit basically be "participate in the studies of others". I get why they do it this way (otherwise there wouldn't be enough people willing to participate in undergrad psychology experiments). Personally I find this practice very unethical.

While true, that’s misleading as this is generally for class assignments not published research.

Some overlap does exist, but it’s significantly less than suggested by the requirement.

What do you mean class assignments? It may vary by university but at my school the studies we participated in were indeed being published. This also was not only for psychology majors but anybody who took 'psych 101' -- participation in at least 3 studies was required to receive credit for the class.

It was fun, but it was seriously disillusioning to see how absurd most psychology studies are. Two researchers talk to me for 5 minutes about women performing better than men on certain forms of math tests. They then sit me in a room alone for about 10 minutes presumably to try to make me nervous. Finally they give me a test, overtly handing me it on a pink sheet of paper instead of a white one. Then after the test they continually tried to get me to agree that I felt like I probably didn't do so well on the test. I refused - since I was certain I nailed it (it was a cookie cutter pre-sat math type test). They told me I'd receive my results by mail within 2 months. I never did. E-mails asking for such were ignored. The research got published and was of course some trite gender bias explains all difference in math paper.

At the time I just found the whole thing quite absurd. In hindsight, I think it was even worse. That study was prepped and ready for p-hacking. They were measuring and possibly varying a large number of variables there. There was the paper color, the isolation, the 'chat(s)', different sections of the test, were men/women over/under estimating their performance, etc. And they were actively trying to push people into agreeing with what they wanted to find. You're going to be able to find some sort of statistically significant correlation there, even if none actually exists.

I'm not sure whether this is a rant, or informing or both. Let me know if it's a bit too much on the ranting side, I'll edit it.

> Wait, does participating in a study as a subject count for credit, or does working on a study count?

There was this course called "measurements and diagnostics" and for that you had to pass the theory/tutorials of the course and also 10 hours of being a participant in research. If you didn't do the 10 hours of participation, you could do them at any moment you want and if you completed it, you immediately passed the course.

My university has about 400 psychology students, so that is 4000 hours worth of people participating per year. And I'm pretty sure that more universities are doing this. In The Netherlands alone I estimate there to be about 40000 psychology students per year and probably about 5 hours of compulsory 'participation' in experimental studies. So a tiny country like The Netherlands is skewing this particular bias about 20000 participant hours per year.

Participating in experimental studies is quite fun (pro tip: go for the fMRI and EEG studies ASAP! ;-) ), but I didn't appreciate how I was forced to do it. I didn't learn too much from those experiments and I felt used. It furthermore is a way to be lazy regarding participant recruitment. I'm pretty sure that some startup could disrupt this particular problem. If you have ideas about it, email me, I'm willing to brainstorm and help you to look for ways to solve this problem.

> Aren't studies explicit about the demographics of their participants? And don't studies that make generalized claims usually control for things like gender and age?

Studies are explicit about the demographics, which is why the WEIRD article could be written. And yes they do control for things like gender and age and in general they are quite careful making those claims. The issue is though as a research field psychology isn't the study of the human mind and human behavior but of WEIRD people their mind and WEIRD people their behavior.

Like a lot of societal issues that are in popular media today, this is a systemic issue. Though I could imagine psychology researchers being like: "Hmm, I could get a representative group or I could just get some psychology students and churn my next paper out twice as fast!"

Would it be fair to say that by being forced to participate in a study you aren’t really giving your consent? Even though I presume you get to find/pick the studies you participate in.

Its not just fair, i'd say its accurate.

Here's another interesting phenomenon: a certain personality type (of which I may or may not count my self among) will deliberately supply false data which attempts to invalidate what we perceive as your study goal when forced to participate against our wills in this way. Its a small rebellion against an academic system that doesn't respect us or intellectual integrity, but is focused on pumping out shoddy research on unwilling participants.

Turn academics into a game and thats how it'll be treated.

I remember this practice of almost-compelled research participation even in the introductory undergraduate Psychology 101 course, and in that class (which included high school students and tons of non-majors) there was a lot of the attitude you describe.

Generally, there are "alternative" assignments that you can do instead, but they're usually somewhat more annoying.

In my case, we had no alternative. If you chose to study psychology at my uni, you had to do this.

Was there some choice of what studies? So that if you object to a particular one you could decline... if you object to all of them then I guess you should study something else.

I can only speak for the American university I work for, but here, every Informed Consent form explicitly states that participants can withdraw at any time for any reason and still get credit.

That seems unfair and wrong. I'm forced to have a job to pay my bills and I get to pick my job but that doesn't exactly mean it's without my consent.

I also have the choice of not working or wiring some other job.

I would say it's a responsibility not supporting forced on people against their will. Two very different things.

I'm talking about the concept of "voluntary informed consent" in the context of the ethics of research studies. It's a far more specific thing than 'oh our capitalist system requires our labour or we'll freeze to death'.

Voluntary informed consent generally requires that participation is completely voluntary, that any rewards for participating don't cause undue influence on the participant's decision to participate and that there will be no consequences or loss of benefits for not participating.

I would argue that to reach this standard the requirement to participate in studies to complete your degree would need to be known before enrollment (likely the case) and the actual study you'll be participating in needs to be identified (almost definitely not the case). Anything less and students will find themselves financially and personally committed to a course of education without truly knowing what they'll be required to do to pass.

If you're interested in the topic, take a look at this neat little booklet: https://oprs.usc.edu/files/2017/04/Informed-Consent-Booklet-...

> Participating in experimental studies is quite fun (pro tip: go for the fMRI and EEG studies ASAP! ;-) ), but I didn't appreciate how I was forced to do it. I didn't learn too much from those experiments and I felt used. It furthermore is a way to be lazy regarding participant recruitment. I'm pretty sure that some startup could disrupt this particular problem.

I don't see much ability to innovate here other than Mechanical Turking out the work to people you pay to participate, but if you come up with something interesting I'd love to hear it…

other than Mechanical Turking out the work to people you pay to participate

You'd be surprised how common that is.

It's actually a decent source of money as a student. Go lie in the fMRT for an hour or two (I just sleep if there's nothing to do) and they will wire you ~10€/hour or more.

Exact same thing going on in the courses over here in Aus.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions as well as you did.

I'm taking an intro neuroscience course this term. We can participate in department studies for extra credit, of up to a 3% bump for the entire course.

Getting research subjects is hard. For any significant sort of test beyond a simple survey, it is really really hard. So colleges force their undergrads to be participants so that the graduates have enough fodder to write research papers off. Of course, the IRB views this as unethical, so all the undergraduates are given an alternative to being a participant in research, at which point it becomes a question of crafting an alternative that is painful enough all the undergrads choose being a research subject but not so painful the IRB considers it unethical.

I'm use to the alternative being a research paper that can easily take 20 times longer to complete than being a test subject.

Characterizing the research domain as universal characteristics of human psychology has the convenient side effect of making demographics irrelevant.

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