How anonymous is participation? We do not collect names, addresses or identifying information in any of our experiments. (In some experiments, we do record initials or parts of birth dates, but that is rare.) Whatever we do collect is not shared in with anyone outside the lab except in aggregate form, averaged in with other responses. We do collect IP addresses -- the address of your computer that is available to any website your visit. We collect these in order to check for things like repeat subjects (remember, the experiment always asks if you are a repeat participant, so if you are, you save us a lot of work by just saying "yes"). The IP addresses are not released for any reason. Remember also that the IP address identifies the computer, not you. Can I find out what my results were? Whenever possible, we program the experiments to give you your results when you finish. However, most of our experiments require averaging data over many, many people, so that isn't always possible. At the end of the experiment, we cannot tell you how you performed compared to the average person, since your name isn't attached to your data. When results are available, we will post them on this website. We will also notify everybody on our email list. Do you abuse your email list? We only send out emails when there are new experiments or the results of old experiments are available. If that happened every day, we'd all quickly win Nobel Prizes -- and there isn't even a Novel Prize for our line of work! So far, we average less than one email per month. The email list itself is maintained by Google Groups. We trust their security. As for us, we will not share your email address with anybody for any reason. |