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What Do Participants Think of Our Research Practices? An Examination of Behavioral Psychology Participants’ Preferences

What research practices should be considered acceptable? Historically, scientists have set the standards for what constitutes acceptable research practices. However, there is value in considering non-scientists’ perspectives, including research participants’. 1,873 participants from MTurk and university subject pools were surveyed after their participation in one of eight minimal-risk studies. We asked participants how they would feel if common research practices were applied to their data: p-hacking/cherry-picking results, selective reporting of studies, Hypothesizing After Results are Known (HARKing), committing fraud, conducting direct replications, sharing data, sharing methods, and open access publishing. An overwhelming majority of psychology research participants think questionable research practices (e.g., p-hacking, HARKing) are unacceptable (68.3--81.3%), and were supportive of practices to increase transparency and replicability (71.4--80.1%). A surprising number of participants expressed positive or neutral views toward scientific fraud, raising concerns about the quality of our data. We grapple with this concern and interpret our results in light of the limitations of our study. Despite ambiguity in our results, we argue that there is evidence (from our study and others’) that researchers may be violating participants’ expectations and should be transparent with participants about how their data will be used.