Using literary analysis, alongside linguistic and sociological ideas, attempt to elucidate the sort of person who wrote this. Who are they? Why do they write like this? What is their purpose in doing so? Not just phenomenologically, meaning what they hope the words on the page convey or achieve, but also why they actually chose to write them in this particular manner. What can you infer about this individual? 

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Two promises need participants to make

We’d absolutely love your participation in this study. In fact, we’d love as many people as we can get to help us collect as much data as we can on the varied human brains, so we can make a more complete model of not only human behaviour, but of how we can better design human societies to improve our interactions with one another.

However, in order to participate, there are some rules, regulations, and by laws by which both we (the lab group) and you (our participants) need to follow and adhere, in order to make sure that everything that happens over the course of the study is above board, is cleared by the ethics committee, and ultimately, goes over in a way that we can all feel went over ethically and fairly for all. Our final concern on the topic of rule and such are designed so that we are collecting the highest quality that we can, Meaning, we make best use of your time and ours, and the conclusions that we’re able to draw are more likely to be able to help people all over the world.

In terms of those principles about collecting high-quality data, they also intersect with the rules and regulations that we mentioned earlier. And both of those are essentially about honesty; we mean that in two different ways, and we’re going to go over both in quite a bit of detail to make sure that everyone here understands. If you ever have a question, put your hand up and we will answer. Just to spoil the surprise, the two ways are as follows:

(1) I want your honesty when you’re answering the questions that we provide to you. Which means, if it’s a multiple-choice question, I want you to pick the most correct answer. That is, the one that is the most truthful. If you feel there’s a toss-up between two, pick the one that feels more correct, okay?

And if there’s a free-form field where you type something in, again, be truthful. Type in what you feel is the most truthful answer. And I emphasise this because sometimes this is very hard when we’re ashamed of the answer, say, or we wish the answer wasn’t true, or the answer is something that we’ve been pushing down for a long time. We don’t want to say it.

But this is the first honesty I’m asking of you, that no matter what it makes you feel, no matter how hard it is, and no matter why you may or may not want to say it, I ask that you always answer truthfully when you place an answer in the question and submit.

(2) The second sort of honesty I want from you is a little more abstract, but it’s honesty about your interaction with the device. Which is to say, if you’re working between options, you don’t know whether it’s A or D, for example, I don’t want you to just sit back and look at the screen and think about it in your head. I want you to use the mouse to hover over A and maybe click it, then go back and hover over D and click that.

There’s no one right way to do this, of course, and I’m not telling you there is. And honestly, if sitting back and thinking is what you think is the best way for you to do it, then do that. What I mean to just say is, don’t pretend that you don’t know the answer or that you’re split between two. I want it to be clear from the data what you’re thinking. I want you to, if you think it’s A, click A, but then maybe if you think about it some more, it’s actually E and click E. Because ultimately when we’re not looking at you through a webcam, and we’re not listening to you via microphone, we can only gather so much data about how you use the computer, and so I want to see your honesty in terms of how you use the computer.

If there’s a free-form box, and you’re not sure what the answer is, but you have some ideas, maybe try typing some in and then backspacing. Type another one, backspace it out until you come up with the actual correct one. As before, if this isn’t honest to you, this isn’t how you interact with computers, that’s perfectly fine, and I want you to be honest in that way. But don’t pretend for our sake that you’re more or less sure than you are about the answers when you sit there, and you’re trying to work with them. There have been questions on ones I’ve taken where I’ve sat there for over 30 minutes trying to pick an answer. So, never feel bad about feeling unsure. Just make sure that the way you interact with the computer matches with the way that you truly interact with computers and the way that you would naturally do it. And that’s the second form of honesty that I ask for from you.

Now, as a final note, before we get to all the legal forms and such, there is one more important point which is: this study, while we hope will be a lot of fun, and we’re going to try our best to make it so, is not going to be easy. We’ve designed it that way on purpose.

This is a study about how people interact with difficult questions, and for a lot of the questions, you are going to find them very difficult. They may even upset or depress you. And in fact, we hope that they do.

And so if at any point you feel like, “I can’t take this anymore,” or, “I just want to stop, I don’t care about the data, I just need a break, or I just need to get out of here,” please, please let us know. We will not be upset with you in the least.

In fact, we would rather that than you felt like you had to keep going when you didn’t want to. And so we will have an option on each page where, if at any point you wish to stop or take a break, you can click it, and we’ll talk about what happens next.

So those are the two main forms of honesty that I ask for from you, and these are the rules and regulations by which the study is run.

Now, as I said, there’s a lot more in terms of the legal documents and such. We have to be very careful with these things because we’re dealing with sensitive data, and so we need to make sure that we’re both protecting you and protecting us.

We also want to ensure that you know exactly what we are doing, how we are using your data, who it is shared with, for how long, the conditions under which it might be deleted, and so on. So there’s a lot of legalese in these forms that can be quite dense. But I will say this:

If at any point you have any questions about the forms, please ask us. We’re happy to explain. If we ever see a question or a concern from someone, we always stop and let everyone know what it is, so we can all get answers for it, and so that no one is in the dark.
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