Internet Experiments
The rules for Internet experiments will be announced at the registration page for the specific experiment.
Laboratory experiments
1) In order to participate in experiments conducted in the lab you need to register online. By registering for experiments, you indicate your intention to take part in experiments conducted by researchers of the Faculty.
2) For each experiment, a certain number of registered persons will get an invitation email. Only the invited persons have the right to take part in the experiment.
3) In case you get an email which invites you to participate in a particular experiment, you have to answer positively to this email in order to be able to take part in the experiment. By doing so, you indicate your availability to participate.
4) For each experiment, an excess number of participants will be invited. The first invited persons arriving at the experiment's location will participate. However, It is common practice among experimenters that all persons who were invited and arrived timely receive a "show-up" fee regardless of whether they were admitted for participation or not.
An experimental session can be canceled for a number of reasons. If you registered for a session that was canceled
AND the cancellation notification was emailed to you in less than two hours prior the original starting time
AND because of that you did not know it was cancelled
AND you showed up in the lab
you can still receive your show-up fee.
5) In many experiments participants have an opportunity to earn some amount of money. However, the exact amounts can be very different for different individuals because earnings depend on their individual decisions, and, sometimes, decisions of other participants and an element of chance.
6) All invited persons consenting to participate in an experiment will be asked to sign an Informed Consent form before the beginning of an experiment. However, even after signing the form each participant is free to leave at any moment without having to provide any explanations.
7) During an experiment, each participant must act upon the rules stated by the experimentalists in the instructions. Persons failing to follow the rule will be asked to leave the lab and will not receive any compensation except for the "show-up" fee.
8) No payments will be made until the experimental session is over.
9) To ensure that only those people who have been invited and who positively answered to the invitation email take part in the experiment, participants are asked to provide proof of their identity. People failing to provide such will not receive the show up payment and will not participate.
10)
Therefore, by registering for laboratory experiments, you agree with the following statements:
I have been informed that if I do not show up on time for an experiment I have been enrolled for, I may not be admitted to participate and will not receive any payment.
I understand any kind of disruptive behavior during an experimental session as well as not showing up for an experiment and failing to properly notify (at least three hours prior the experiment) about my inability to participate will be considered a disrespect to the researchers conducting the study and to other participants and I may not be allowed to participate in the future experiments conducted in the laboratory. |
Registration database
The data contained by the registration system serve exclusively the organization of scientific experiments. These data are not shared with third parties. We use the data for the following purposes:
- to inform the participants about new laboratory and Internet experiments,
- to perform a scientifically motivated selection of participants for certain experiments,
- and to verify the appearance or non-appearance of the registered participants in experiments.
Any person registered in the system can choose to stop receiving further invitations to experiments at any moment. Any person registered in the system can choose to cancel her(his) registration completely, in which case all the information about her(his) participation in the experiments will be fully erased from the system.
Use of the experimental data
During an experimental session, when participants act following the instructions, the information about the decisions they make (e.g. the decisions themselves, the amount of time it takes to make various decisions, details of communication with other participants, etc.) becomes experimental data. These (anonymous) data will then be analyzed by the experimenters with the purpose to discover new knowledge about human behavior generalizable beyond the group of subjects who participated in the experiment. Such knowledge, if discovered, will be disseminated, typically, through publications in the academic and industry journals, presentations made on conferences, workshops and seminars. Also, it is a standard practice in the profession that the data is kept for indefinitely long. It is not unusual that the data collected decades ago is still used by contemporary researchers.
Anonymity
The data collected during an experiment is anonymous (somewhat similar to how voting data is collected in general elections). This means, specifically, the following:
- Anonymity of participation. No any personally identifiable information is recorded during experimental sessions and, using these data it impossible to establish that person X participated in the experiment.
- Strong anonymity of decisions. Third parties, even knowing that an individual X participated in some experiment, will not be able to deduce the decisions made by this participant. Moreover, the participant her(him)self will not be able to prove it was she/he who made certain decisions.
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