Objecting to consensual experiments even while approving of nonconsensual imposition of the policies they contain

In previous survey studies using decision-making vignettes in which respondents rated and ranked the appropriateness of universally implementing one intervention for all relevant people (A), universally implementing another intervention (B), or conducting an experiment (or A/B test) to compare these interventions before implementing the superior one, we have found that people are often averse to the A/B test, even when they approve of implementing either of the interventions the experiment contains (Meyer et al., 2019, Heck et al., 2020). However, these vignettes did not say explicitly whether or not consent to the A/B test—or to universal imposition of either A or B, untested—would be obtained. In a preregistered analysis, when we asked respondents in four of our previous survey experiments to explain their ratings, 18% of those who rated the A/B test commented negatively on the apparent lack of consent, compared to fewer than 1% of participants who rated the A or B conditions offering the same objection (Meyer et al., 2019). Because implementing A and implementing B, collectively, entail imposing the same risks on people as conducting an A/B test, this contrast is puzzling. Moreover, pragmatic trials of the sort our vignettes describe are often not feasible to conduct with consent; as a result, IRBs often waive the default requirement of consent and ethicists have also argued that consent to research is not always required. Here, in three studies using previous materials, we test the effect on experiment aversion (Heck et al., 2020; cf. Mislavsky et al., 2019) and the A/B effect (Meyer et al., 2019) of stipulating that consent to the A/B test either will or will not be obtained. In both vignettes we test, we find that negative sentiments towards experiments persist even when it is explicitly stated that consent will be obtained. While these negative sentiments are substantially reduced when consent is present (compared to when consent is absent or not mentioned), significant experiment aversion and A/B effects remain: 29–31% of participants were averse to the experiment and 32–39% ranked it as the worst decision the agent could make—even when consent would be obtained from everyone involved in the A/B test and from no one involved in either policy imposition.