The hats were made in Nicaragua, really.

Numerous professional fields have codes of ethics. Numerous individuals have their own personal casuistries which can manifest themselves in structured expressions of moral or ethical belief.

For example, the bellicose snake cuddlers of the Martym Waste pledge that they will never bet against their own snakes in any cuddle matches. Permitting such behavior would be prone to abuse, as the cuddler would be tempted to cruelly withhold love from the snake in advance of the cuddle match, thereby sabotaging the cuddle balance.

In Framingham, Massachussetts, there's a girl who refuses to buy soap made from fish fat; only the pork-based soaps are acceptable to her. The reasoning for this is irrelevant.

The American medical industry has many ethical rules, and the American pharmaceutical industry does not.

Lawyers have to behave in certain ways with regard to their clients.

The American Psychological Association has ethical principles. In the area of experimentation, some principles are shared with the medical industry: informed consent, for instance. For non-professionals, this is not an issue, and you will see laymen performing experiments on unwitting persons all the time.

I once saw someone announce that she found Panama hats irresistably sexy. She thought it would be fun to lie to see whether or not anyone would wear Panama hats the next day. A few people did. She laughed and called them pathetic losers. For a legitimate psychologist, this would be improper behavior; the victims of the experiment did not give informed consent. For her, apparently, there is nothing objectionable in this behavior.

Another important precept is the post-experiment debriefing. One may assume that an experiment is just a one-off thing and if things don't work as planned, one can just move on and try something new. Unfortunately, social experiments can cause irreparable harm to the participants, which is why the experimenters take precautions to avoid harm throughout the experiment, and do damage control as part of the debriefing if the preventative measures have failed.

For the Panama hat girl, there is no obligation for avoidance of harm, debriefing, or cleaning up any mess she might have caused. Perhaps karma or ill will will bite her in the ass. Perhaps not.

Fortunately, people do not submit to whimsy and perform social experiments without thinking through the potential consequences very, very carefully. Under other conditions, the world might be a place of distress, and sociology books might be more than 4 pages thick.