The "Risks of Routine Tests" and Analogical Reasoning in Assessments of Minimal Risk.

Research risks have to meet minimal risk requirements in order for the research to qualify for expedited ethics review, to be exempted from ethics review, or to be granted consent waivers. The definition of "minimal risk" in the Common Rule (45 CFR 46) relies on the risks-of-daily-life and risks-of-routine-tests as comparators against which research activities are assessed to meet minimal risk requirements. While either or both comparators have been adopted by major ethics codes, they have also been criticized. In response to criticisms, elaborations, and alternative comparators have been proposed. In this paper, I approach the search for workable comparators from the point of view that ethical reasoning about minimal risk involves analogical reasoning using comparators. In this regard, I develop two necessary conditions for an adequate minimal risk conception, which I use to assess three comparators. I conclude that the risks-of-routine-tests best fits the analogical reasoning operating in minimal risk assessments.

Distractions, analytical thinking and falling for fake news: A survey of psychological factors.

Analytical thinking safeguards us against believing or spreading fake news. In various forms, this common assumption has been reported, investigated, or implemented in fake news education programs. Some have associated this assumption with the inverse claim, that distractions from analytical thinking may render us vulnerable to believing or spreading fake news. This paper surveys the research done between 2016 and 2022 on psychological factors influencing one's susceptibility to believing or spreading fake news, considers which of the psychological factors are plausible distractors to one's exercise of analytical thinking, and discusses some implications of considering them as distractors to analytical thinking. From these, the paper draws five conclusions: (1) It is not analytical thinking per se, but analytical thinking directed to evaluating the truth that safeguards us from believing or spreading fake news. (2) While psychological factors can distract us from exercising analytical thinking and they can also distract us in exercising analytical thinking. (3) Whether a psychological factor functions as a distractor from analytical thinking or in analytical thinking may depend on contextual factors. (4) Measurements of analytical thinking may not indicate vulnerability to believing or spreading fake news. (5) The relevance of motivated reasoning to our tendency to believe fake news should not yet be dismissed. These findings may be useful to guide future research in the intersection of analytical thinking and susceptibility to believing or spreading fake news.

Crowdsourced Research: Vulnerability, Autonomy, and Exploitation.

The use of crowd workers as research participants is fast becoming commonplace in social, behavioral, and educational research, and institutional review boards are encountering more and more research protocols concerning these workers. In what sense are crowd workers vulnerable as research participants, and what should ethics reviewers look out for in evaluating a crowdsourced research protocol? Using the popular crowd-working platform Amazon Mechanical Turk as the key example, this article aims to provide a starting point for a heuristic for ethical evaluation. The first part considers two reputed threats to crowd workers' autonomy-undue inducements and dependent relationships-and finds that autonomy-focused arguments about these factors are inconclusive or inapplicable. The second part proposes applying Alan Wertheimer's analysis of exploitation instead to frame the ethics of crowdsourced research. The article then provides some concrete suggestions for ethical reviewers based on the exploitation framework.

The indispensability of labelled groups to vulnerability in bioethics.

Regarding the determination of vulnerability, the bioethics community has univocally jettisoned "labelled groups", groups whose membership confers a context-invariant "vulnerable" status to their members. While the usual reasons against the sole use of labelled groups to determine the vulnerability of individuals are sound, labelled groups as exemplars of vulnerability can play indispensable roles in bioethical reasoning. In this article, I argue against the wholesale jettisoning of labelled groups by showing how they can be useful.