Scientists Exaggerate How Ethical They Are in Doing Science

We have known for a long time that people tend to paint a rosy picture of how good they are. Now, we know that scientists are no exception, at least when it comes to conducting their own research. This is especially surprising since scientists are regularly thought to be objective.

Ethics

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This new discovery emerged from a massive survey of 11,050 scientific researchers in Sweden, conducted by Amanda M. Lindkvist, Lina Koppel, and Gustav Tinghög at Linköping University and published in the journal Scientific Reports. The survey was very simple, with only two questions:

Question One: In your role as a researcher, to what extent do you perceive yourself as following good research practices—compared to other researchers in your field?

Rather than allowing the survey participants to each define what “good research practice” is, the researchers gave them these criteria:

1. Tell the truth about one’s research.

2. Consciously review and report the basic premises of one’s studies.

3. Openly account for one’s methods and results.

4. Openly account for one’s commercial interests and other associations.

5. Do not make unauthorized use of others’ research results.

6. Keep one’s research organized, for example, through documentation and filing.

7. Strive to conduct one’s research without doing harm to people, animals, or the environment.

8. Be fair in one’s judgment of others’ research.

Note that many of these criteria have to do with honesty, but there are also ones on conscientiousness, non-malevolence, and fairness.

What were the results? Participants used a scale to rate themselves from 1 to 7, with 1 = Much less than other researchers, 4 = As much as other researchers, and 7 = Much more than other researchers. This is what the responses revealed:

• Forty-four percent rated themselves as more ethical in their research practices than other researchers in their field.
• Fifty-five percent rated themselves as the same as their peers.
• Not even 1 percent rated themselves as less ethical than their peers.

Of course, these results can’t reflect real life since, mathematically, there have to be more than 1 percent of scientists who are less than average in this area of their lives.

The other question that Lindkvist and his colleagues asked these scientific researchers was this:

Question Two: To what extent do you perceive researchers within your field as following good research practices—compared to researchers within other fields?

Here, too, the results were very skewed. Around 29 percent said their field followed good research practices to a greater extent than did scientists in other fields. Only 8 percent said it was the other way around.

These results should surprise us for a couple of reasons. One is that they go against the popular narrative of scientists as objective and neutral. When it comes to their own ethical behavior in conducting their research, they appear as a whole to be biased and overconfident. Another reason these results are surprising is that many scientists are likely aware of the existence of scientific research on how people, in general, tend to have an inflated view of their own virtue. So you’d expect that they would be on guard against such a tendency in their own case.

There are dangers that come with scientists having an overly positive view of their own research ethics. Lindkvist helpfully explains one of them: It “may lead researchers to underestimate the ethical implications of the decisions they make and to sometimes be blind to their own ethical failures. For example, researchers may downplay their own questionable practices but exaggerate those of other researchers, perhaps especially researchers outside their field.” Another danger that Lindkvist notes is a greater tendency to ignore warnings and ethical safeguards if they are dismissed by a scientist as applying to others but not to themselves since they think they are above average.

It would be interesting in future work to see if similar patterns emerge with researchers in other countries besides Sweden. It would also be interesting to look at researchers anonymously rating the research ethics of their colleagues in their own departments and schools.

If these results hold up, it will be important to find ways to encourage scientific researchers to correct their inflated perceptions. As Lindkvist urges, “To restore science’s credibility, we need to create incentive structures, institutions, and communities that foster ethical humility and encourage us to be our most ethical selves in an academic system that otherwise incentivizes us to be bad.”

This article also appears in Forbes.