So you get a letter that says “IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS” on the outside. Of course most pieces of mail marked “important” are the opposite, but you open it up anyway. Inside is your name and the first initials and last names of five of your neighbors, along with each person’s political contributions for the previous year and to which party that contribution was made. So, for instance: “J. Smith, $100, DEM.”
Kind of weird, right?
Susan Kelley of Orlando, Fla., received such a letter recently and assumed it was a scam. She was surprised to see that the letter said it was from researchers at Harvard University, and had a hard time believing that because the letter seemed so unofficial. Along with listing the contributions of a handful of her neighbors, the letter included the URL for the Federal Election Commission, informing her that she could look up how much her “neighbors, friends, family, and co-workers” had contributed.
She found it disconcerting. “While I am well aware that the information is public, as is a great deal of other information about each of us, I was offended that Harvard University would feel it was in the interests of research to urge people to view each other’s political contributions,” she writes in an e-mail. “I am no more interested in the contributions of my neighbors to their favorite politicians than I am in how they vote.”
She wonders: “Toward what end, Harvard researchers?”
Fair question. The research is being conducted by Ricardo Perez-Truglia, a graduate student in economics at Harvard, and Guillermo Cruces, deputy director of the Center for Distributive, Labor, and Social Studies at the National University of La Plata, in Argentina. According to the Web site for the project, the purpose of sending out the letters is to understand how “the open nature of information can affect contributions.” I’m going to guess that researchers plan to check whether the people who received letters contributed more or less money the following year. But I could be wrong.
The researchers declined to offer more information about the study until it’s completed. They wouldn’t say how many letters they had sent or how many complaints they had received (though Truglia wrote in an e-mail that it was an “extremely small” number). The project was approved in advance by Harvard’s Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research, but, in a statement, the university said that a research-ethics committee would “review these complaints to determine if changes should be implemented to the study or, as all the planned mailings have already been sent, whether lessons learned from this study and the questions and complaints it generated can inform the design of future studies.”
The letter that the researchers sent out was posted on this blog and, in the comments, a number of people who say they also received the letter let their feelings be known. One calls it “creepy” and another “shoddy.” Though not everyone is negative. One commenter writes that “there is no point getting mad at Harvard, this information has been on the public record for a very long time.”
