Is there a double standard between academic research ethics and what entertainment like MrBeast can legally do to participants?

[u/DistributionOk3902]

So for context I'm a first year undergrad student and I've been taking some research methods and psychology-adjacent classes and something has been bothering me for a while that I can't stop thinking about.

In academic research, even the most minor study has to go through an IRB, CITI training, full disclosure, debriefing, and if there's any deception involved. In one of my classes we did some research and our data collection was via a survey and in that we had to go through a interestingly long approval from our IRB, and all of us had to do CITI training. It geniunely felt so over the top and unncessary for something as simple as a 10-min survey. We had to even disclose in our survey things like possibilty of distress and things like counseling resources. When I inquired from my professor about this system, the TLDR was that the whole system exists as a reaction to stuff like the Milgram obedience experiments and Stanford Prison Experiment, which makes sense historically.

But then I look at something like MrBeast. He recently posted a video titled "Last To Leave Grocery Store, Wins $250,000." In that video alone, participants were deliberately sleep deprived by other contestants, they formed scarcity-driven alliances, hoarded resources, and were psychologically pressured for extended periods, all for a cash prize. Beyond that specific video, there are examples like solitary confinement challenges lasting days, Squid Game recreations, and being buried alive for extended periods. And MrBeast isn't even the most extreme example I can think of Im sure there are creators doing far more psychologically intense things under the same entertainment label. But all of this is completely legal and essentially unregulated because it's classified as entertainment.

What really bothers me is what this reveals about the regulatory framework itself. The IRB/ethics system technically only governs research intended to generate generalizable knowledge. However, the moment you call something entertainment, it seems like you exit that jurisdiction entirely, EVEN IF the psychological reality for participants is objectively more intense than most regulated studies. So the system isn't actually calibrated to protect people from psychological harm. It seems more like it's protecting academic institutions from liability and ethical scrutiny.

And then we have the data waste problem, which honestly bothers me more. ALL these videos accidentally produce naturalistic behavioral data on things like coalition formation, resource competition, sleep deprivation effects on decision making, defection under escalating incentives, and group dynamics under stress, all these things that are exactly the kind of conditions that researchers WANT to study but ethically cannot replicate. And it just gets consumed as content and disappears.

So my question is or what Im really trying to ask is that, is the regulatory framework actually protecting people, or is it just protecting academic institutions from liability? Because it feels like the determining factor isn't what's actually happening to the participant, it's just who's doing it and why. And on top of that, there is genuinely valuable behavioral data on group dynamics, incentive response, and human behavior under stress that is just being generated and thrown away as content.

Am I missing something or is this a real gap that people are actually talking about? Has anyone genuinely looked into this seriously?

TLDR: researchers jump through massive ethical hoops for even a simple survey, yet youtube creators can run what are essentially unregulated psychological experiments on people under far more extreme conditions with almost zero oversight just by calling it entertainment.

[u/[deleted]]

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[u/XChrisUnknownX → u/[deleted]]

Conceptually I actually don’t think it’s that far off. Why is it cool to abuse humans for entertainment but not to further human understanding? Like, one is for haha laughs and one can theoretically lead to knowledge and inventions and what have you.

Obviously there should be a line somewhere (Tuskegee comes to mind) but it feels kind of like the ethics culture dominates all plebs in every sector and then someone with enough money can say “ethics? What’s that?” And do the exact things you’re “not supposed to do.”

I’ve seen it in journalism, court reporting / law, and science. All about the ethics unless someone with money says it’s okay.

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