Abstract

As the Internet has changed communication, commerce, and the distribution of information, so too it is changing psychological research. Psychologists can observe new or rare phenomena online and can do research on traditional psychological topics more efficiently, enabling them to expand the scale and scope of their research. Yet these opportunities entail risk both to research quality and to human subjects. Internet research is inherently no more risky than traditional observational, survey, or experimental methods. Yet the risks and safeguards against them will differ from those characterizing traditional research and will themselves change over time. This article describes some benefits and challenges of conducting psychological research via the Internet and offers recommendations to both researchers and institutional review boards for dealing with them. The Internet and the widespread diffusion of personal computing have the potential for unparalleled impact on the conduct of psychological research, changing the way psychologists collaborate, collect data, and disseminate their results. In this article, we focus on the way the Internet is changing the process of empirical research, identifying both opportunities and challenges. The Internet presents empirical researchers with tremendous opportunities. It lowers many of the costs of collecting data on human behavior, allowing researchers, for example, to run online experiments involving thousands of subjects with minimal intervention on the part of experimenters (Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002b). Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards provide a rich sample of human behavior that can be mined for studies of communication (Galegher, Sproull, & Kiesler, 1998), prejudice (Glaser, Dixit, &

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