Ah, the naivety of the older generation. Nearly 500 eminent astronomers, biologists, chemists, physicists and earth scientists have been surveyed to identify the “core traits of exemplary scientists”. Their answer? Honesty is critical, second only to curiosity, and we ought to do more to instil it in those considering science careers.
Ironically, they are deceiving themselves. Researchers have never been whiter than white. Here are a couple of revealing numbers. About 2 per cent of scientists admit to at least one act of research misconduct. But as a whole, researchers say that around 14 per cent of their colleagues are involved in such behaviour. Someone’s not being straight.
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Those figures come from a (far more scientifically reliable than a single sample of “honoured” academics), that also found one-third of scientists confessed to “questionable research practices” such as cooking data, mining it for a significant result that is then presented as the original target of the study, selective publication or concealing conflicts of interest.
We may never know for sure how widespread such behaviour is. According to another meta-analysis published in October, . That study also found that researchers see plagiarism as more heinous than making results up. They are more likely to report a colleague they catch in an act of plagiarism than one fabricating or falsifying data.
Normal misbehaviour
How can this be so, when honesty is supposedly such an essential attribute? Because it gets the job done. Raymond De Vries at the University of Michigan and colleagues that data manipulation based on intuition of what a result should look like is “normal misbehaviour”. They see such common misbehaviours as having “a useful and irreplaceable role” in science. Why? Because of “the ambiguities and everyday demands of scientific research”.
In other words, data isn’t often as clean as you would like. According to Frederick Grinnell, an ethicist at the University of Texas, intuition is “an important, and perhaps in the end a researcher’s best, guide to distinguishing between data and noise”. Sometimes you just know that data point was an anomaly to be ignored.
Should we do something to make science more virtuous? Probably not. Those eminent academics questioned for the survey by Michigan State University, which was released today at the , are hopelessly optimistic when it comes to improving ethical standards: 94 per cent of them said students can learn scientific values and virtues from “exemplary scientists”.
Clearly they haven’t read the that found teaching research ethics made students more likely, not less, to misbehave. Scientists, eh? It’s almost like they’re human.
