The Costs of Ethics Creep

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) exercise veto power on most empirical research in the social and behavioural sciences. Although widely regarded as essential safeguards in behavioural research, their overall impact on knowledge production has been seldom scrutinized, much less systematically examined. Rather than evaluating IRBs in terms of their stated aims, this article considers them as institutions based on process characteristics: that is, as decision making units facing bureaucratic incentives to impose costs on others. From this political economic perspective, ethics review functions not as a neutral guardrail, but as an active agent influencing the selection pressures within the scientific ecosystems they regulate. This article examines the following key mechanisms through which IRBs affect knowledge production: (1) cost inflation and quality dilution that reduces both the supply of and demand for the knowledge produced by research; (2) selection effects operating on researcher characteristics and on the bureaucratization of decision-making processes in a direction detrimental to the quality and integrity of research production; and (3) non-random distortions of methods, topics, and rates of independent replication are all expected to contribute to a reduction in the practical significance and societal benefit of affected academic institutions. These impacts escalate because of asymmetric accountability and motivated mission expansion in a system where overreach more often self-reinforces than becomes restrained by corrective feedback. This points to empirical predictions and highlights the need to quantify the real costs of unchecked IRB expansion.