To ensure these partnerships are beneficial to all involved—companies, employees, customers, and researchers­—behavioral scientists need a set of ethical standards for conducting research in companies. To address this need, we created The Behavioral Scientist’s Ethics Checklist. In the checklist, we outline six key principles and questions that behavioral scientists and companies should ask themselves before beginning their research. To illustrate how each principle operates in practice, we provide mini case studies highlighting the challenges other researchers and companies have faced.

A study find that just asking about behavior can lead to an increase in that behavior -- whether positive or negative.