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Virtual Guinea Pigs : Ethical implications of Human Subjects Research in Virtual Worlds

In recent years, virtual worlds have increasingly become a focus of researchers across a multitude of disciplines, as researchers are beginning to discover the previously untapped research potential of virtual worlds (Bainbridge, 2007). However, with new technologies and methodologies for research come new ethical concerns or at least the need to re-evaluate existing codes of conduct. Currently, many researchers appear to see little harm in meddling in the virtual realm. In fact, the lack of harm is touted as one of the advantages of virtual world research. Often, researchers rationalize that virtual worlds are fair game for a number of reasons – some reasonable, others questionable. These rationalizations are a product of an oversimplification of the reasons why people participate in virtual communities and virtual worlds. This paper will discuss the ethical issues and implications surrounding the use of virtual worlds as a sandbox for research. The first section of this paper provides a brief historical overview of the founding ethical principles of human subjects research, abstracting and highlighting fundamental procedures and practices. The second section discusses and elaborates on the potential ethical issues and problems of doing human subjects research in virtual worlds. The third section examines the ethical implications of virtual world research through the lenses of several traditional ethical theories. In the fourth section, several virtual world research scenarios are extrapolated to demonstrate the complexity of the ethical issues at hand. In the final section, recommendations to mitigate or resolve ethical concerns in human subjects research in virtual worlds are proposed and discussed. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF ETHICS IN HUMAN RESEARCH History has repeatedly demonstrated that horrible atrocities can occur without proper ethical guidelines and enforcement. Using historical landmarks in human research, several parallels between research involving humans and research involving avatars can be seen. While issues of ethics and human research have been intertwined through the annals of history, the fundamental developments on the ethics of human research are concentrated during the 20th century. Much of the work towards a set of universal moral codes in terms of human medical and behavioral research bore out of a series of infamous events, the most distressing being, the eugenics movement in the United States, the Tuskegee Syphilis study, and the Nazi human experiments during World War II. The eugenics movement, which began in the mid-nineteenth century by English scientist Sir Francis Galton, was based on the idea that only genetically fit individuals should have the right to reproduce, having been based very inaccurately on the principles of evolution (Cowan, 1985; Gray, 1999). This idea led to a “scientific” movement became very popular through the mid-twentieth century in many parts of the world, particularly in the United States. Along with reinforcing the racism and sexism of the time, eugenics became the inspiration for a