You Don’t Want to Be a Human Guinea Pig? That’s Unfortunate
From the article:
In other words, people who thought that A was fine, and also that B was fine, thought that it was unethical to test A and B to see which was better.
The effect was not limited to people with relatively less education. Many people with degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics also object to experimentation.
That’s a big puzzle. If you think that two blood-pressure medicines are fine, why would you object to an effort to see which works better?
Meyer and her colleagues tried to find out. Among other things, they asked participants who had objections to explain the grounds for their objections. (They were allowed to give more than one ground.)
Some people pointed to a lack of consent, but the number was not very high (about 18%). Others were concerned about unequal treatment, but that number was lower still.
The most common explanation was an objection to experimentation as such. About 24% of participants explicitly said that A/B testing amounts to treating people like “guinea pigs” or “playing with lives.”