209: Collective intelligence and the ethics of A/B tests (Christopher Chabris)

May 27, 2018

This episode features cognitive psychologist Christopher Chabris discussing his research on “collective intelligence” — why do some teams perform better than others at a wide variety of tasks? Julia discusses potential objections to the findings and how gender-related publication bias should affect our interpretation of them. In the second half of the episode, Julia and Chris discuss why people get so upset at companies like Facebook and OKCupid for doing experiments on their users, and whether that’s fair.

Transcript (PDF)