Being able to trust what others say, whether to you personally or to the larger public, seems like a cornerstone of gaining new information. There’s a lot of talk about “fake news,” but apart from sensationalism in the media, one would hope that there’s enough reputable material out there to be able to make wise decisions. If a friend tells you to try a new supplement based on supportive online evidence, you’d like to take that friend at their word.
As it turns out, maybe you’re not safe in assuming that what you hear about “the science” is always true. In a highly competitive scientific environment, people who do research can be tempted to find ways to magnify the importance of their work. You’ve undoubtedly read somewhere that one study or another had to be retracted and its results disregarded. Some of these scientific flops seem to have gone under the radar, such as the fact that a big chunk of research on Type A turned out to be falsified. Other findings did create a more public scandal, such as when an Alzheimer’s Disease drug was taken off the market due to faulty data collection.
Lamentations about the problems in such studies provided the instigation for the website retractionwatch.com. Unfortunately for the public, this relatively obscure resource might not be one that you would automatically check before believing a report in the media. In psychology, this is bad enough, but in the field of health, an erroneous finding can have potentially deadly consequences.
Is Something Rotten Only in Denmark?
Thinking about why scientists would engage in such deception might make you wonder whether it’s something about their personalities or something about the current scientific environment that leads to this behavior. Aarhus University’s Jesper Schneider and colleagues (2024) wondered the same thing, and so decided to investigate questionable research practices (QRPs). They used their own country, Denmark, to see if something indeed was “rotten” there, taking advantage of the opportunity to survey their fellow Danes.
Although always there as a mandate, the need to compete in the academic marketplace appears to be growing and could be the culprit. Yet, argue the Danish authors, everyone feels the need to compete, so why doesn’t everyone resort to QRPs? Is there something else going on that is a more general human tendency to cheat?
Schneider et al. postulate that because not everyone does it, there may indeed be important individual differences in personality that contribute to QRPs. The “bad apples” could be sniffed out, they argue, by analyzing relationships among the Five Factor Model (FFM) traits in particular of conscientiousness and agreeableness, both of which are known from other research to relate to academic dishonesty.
Personality and the QRPs
Recognizing that asking people to report on their own cheating may be an unrealistic enterprise, the authors nevertheless decided to survey researchers in their own and four other countries to get an estimate of QRP frequencies. They also asked their participants to rate what they thought the prevalence might be, reasoning that if you’re engaging in a deviant behavior, you might believe it’s not inappropriate because everyone else does it too.
Following the best practices of transparency and openness, Schneider et al. pre-registered their study and hypotheses and made the study and data available to all. Their final sample consisted of 3,402 Danish researchers and 1,307 international researchers. To get additional individual difference data aside from personality, the author team also collected demographic data as well as field of research endeavor (qualitative, quantitative, and in a field using significance tests).
To give you an idea of the QRPs under study, here is a brief list of what was most frequently self-reported in half of recent publications; these are the top three, acknowledged by at least 20% respondents:
- Report non-significant findings as evidence for no effect.
- Selectively over-cite own publications.
- Cite irrelevant literature to please someone else (e.g., article reviewers).
Personality Essential Reads
Overall, the prevalence of a self-reported questionable research practice ranged from 10% to 64% in the Danish and 11% to 15% in the international samples. Approximately half of all participants admitted that they didn’t put enough effort into peer reviewing the work of other researchers.
The authors next tested the role of individual differences in predicting frequency of self-admitted QRPs. What they learned was that people with longer careers were less likely to try to game the system. Perceived pressure, in contrast, positively predicted engagement in QRPs, as did the perception that one’s own research culture had lower standards. As predicted, people who self-reported more QRPs also gave higher estimates of their prevalence. Nothing, based on the findings, was particularly “rotten” about Denmark, as any Danish trends also emerged in the international samples.
The two big personality winners in the prediction equation were conscientiousness and agreeableness. As the authors noted, those high on these traits “will tend to report less intensive engagement with QRPs, suggesting they are less willing to ‘cut corners’ intentionally” (p. 23). In a universe where everyone is subject to more or less the same degree of pressure, personality will win out as a key individual predictor.
How to Sort Through the Bad Apples
These findings may be somewhat unsettling. Not only do you not know the personalities of a research team, but you don’t necessarily have the expertise to judge whether a researcher is magnifying their own findings or publishing a study that wasn’t sufficiently reviewed.
You can, however, take heart in the fact that the problem of QRPs is no longer hidden behind a shroud of secrecy. Even if you can’t read the actual article, do some detective work to see if anyone else reports the same or supporting findings.
The findings about bad apples can also be helpful in your own life. Stay away from those who cut corners and stick with the people who you know from personal experience to follow rules and check their work. People who cheat because, in their eyes, “everyone else does” are good ones to stay away from.
To sum up, the research world is no different from the rest of the world in potentially spawning those people who try to get away with some type of distortion of the truth. Knowing that personality can provide a clue in the research world should help you find the people you can trust in your own.