Introduction to Psychology 1/IPSY101/Experimental research/Reflections

OkCupid is an online dating website. The founder Christian Rudder has admitted to experimenting on users, manipulating their match percentages to determine if highly matched individuals actually did end up liking each other more or manipulating photos to observe how it impacted continued communication. Rudder has argued that his experiments are answering important questions, and that users have agreed to their terms of service.

OkCupid is not a research institution and is therefore not subject to the ethical constraints of typical human-participant research. What are your thoughts on the ethics of these experiments?

You can either record your efforts in your private learning journal or you can make your learning public on your blog by using the hastags #IPSY101 #EthicalQuestions. Using these hashtags will allow WEnotes to harvest your contribution and add them to the Course feed.