I admit, I don't have a lot of patience with the Research Ethics Board (REB) (our version of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) discussed in the article). It's slow and it often feels like it's reviewing the research, not the ethics of what we're doing. But it is impossible not to be sympathetic with the purpose of the Board, which is to ensure that scientific research doesn't create harm. And that's what's wrong with the reserach conducted by James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose and what hasn't really been made clear until now. It wasn't simply that they didn't consult their ethics board. It's that, under the guise of 'research', the study appears to have been designed to embarrass or humiliate its subjects. In so doing it discredits all research. And a review board would not have approved it. Image: Resnik, NIH. More: Inside Higher Ed, Daily Nous.
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