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The Sociology of Scientific Misconduct

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The Sociology of Scientific Misconduct C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/7595865/WORKINGFOLDER/PALS/9781107117716C07.3D 176 [176–202] 4.4.2016 10:50AM 7 S/he blinded me with science: the sociology of scientific misconduct jamesn.baron,marissad.king,and olav sorenson Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to misconduct and fraud in academic scholarship, particularly in scientific research. As shown in Figure 7.1, retraction rates among publications in scien- tific journals have increased astronomically – roughly ten-fold since 2000 (Steen, Casadevall, and Fang 2013; Van Noorden 2011). That trend seems both stunning and perplexing if one considers the typical narrative provided to explain these events: Some individual scientist, succumbing to avarice, insecurity, or incompetence, whether knowingly or unwittingly, publishes erroneous findings. His peers nevertheless discover this deviance and ensure its correction. In essence, errant research, whether intentional or not, comes from a set of “bad apples.” But given the slow rate at which turnover occurs in the population of scientists, this explanation would appear to have little purchase in explaining the dramatic rise in retractions over the past decade. Other putative causes – such as the increased competition for scarce funding and positions and improvements in the ability to detect errors and fraud – have also changed far more gradually and slowly than the rate of retractions. Therefore, they would appear incomplete, at best, as explanations for this trend. However, this trend does closely resemble the rate at which the popular press has called attention to misconduct and fraud in another setting: the corporate world. Figure 7.2 documents that trend, with a pattern and magnitude of increase strongly resembling Figure 7.1, save for two anomalous years: 1996 (fallout from the price-fixing The authors gratefully acknowledge generous research support from the Yale School of Management, especially through its Initiative on Leadership and Organization. Donald Palmer offered invaluable comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 176 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/7595865/WORKINGFOLDER/PALS/9781107117716C07.3D 177 [176–202] 4.4.2016 10:50AM S/he blinded me with science: the sociology of scientific misconduct 177 350 PubMed notices 300 Web of science notices 250 200 150 100 Number of retraction notices Number of retraction 50 0 1977 1981 1985 1989 1993 1997 2001 2005 2009 Figure 7.1 Trend in retraction rates in scientific journals Source: Van Noorden (2011: 36) 20,000 18,000 16,000 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 Document count 6,000 4,000 2,000 0 69 71 73 75 77 79 81 83 85 87 89 91 93 95 97 99 01 03 05 07 09 11 Year Figure 7.2 Trend in media mentions of organizational wrongdoing with five- year moving average (see fn. 1 for details) scandal involving Archer Daniels Midland) and 2002 (notable for the collapse of Enron and Andersen).1 1 Figure 7.2 reports results from a search on August 14, 2014 of all publications tracked by Dow Jones’ FACTIVA Online database, using the following query: mention of the word (company OR companies OR corporation OR corporations OR corporate OR business OR businesses OR organizational OR organization OR organizations OR firm OR firms) within three words of a mention of the term (corrupt OR corruption OR crime OR criminal OR fraud OR fraudulent OR unethical OR wrongdoing OR misconduct OR misbehavior). C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/7595865/WORKINGFOLDER/PALS/9781107117716C07.3D 178 [176–202] 4.4.2016 10:50AM 178 James N. Baron, Marissa D. King, and Olav Sorenson Far from being a coincidence, we suspect that the correspondence between these plots reflects the fact that both stem from common causes of organizational wrongdoing, a point to which we return in our conclusion. Below, we draw on our ongoing work examining misconduct in scientific research to identify factors at the interpersonal, organizational, and institutional levels that encourage and inhibit orga- nizational wrongdoing. Beyond simply connecting these trends, we also argue that the study of scientific misconduct can enrich our understanding of organizational wrongdoing in other contexts. Scientific research provides an unusually fruitful domain within which to broaden and deepen this understand- ing for at least two reasons. First, relative to the corporate world and many voluntary associations, academic science takes place within rela- tively “weak” organizations, with highly autonomous and mobile actors. Documenting the embeddedness of academic science (and scien- tific misconduct) within its social and organizational contexts should therefore provide something of a lower bound on the extent and con- sequences of such embeddedness in other settings. Second, academic publications offer the equivalent of a fossil record through which one can infer the probable occurrence of misconduct over time and across settings. Recently developed statistical techniques, for example, allow one to estimate the probabilities that particular investigators have engaged in questionable practices, such as “p-hacking” and use of the “file drawer”–which misrepresent the nature of empirical relation- ships through selective reporting – even when no questions have been raised about the quality or validity of their articles (Benford 1938; Goldfarb and King 2013; Ioandidis and Trikalinos 2007; Simonsohn, Nelson, and Simmons 2014). By contrast, studies of scientific miscon- duct that have relied only on retractions suffer from the same obvious limitation as studies of corporate wrongdoing that have analyzed earn- ings restatements and other irregularities: selection on the dependent variable – they only include instances that have already been discovered as erroneous or fraudulent. Whereas unintentional errors have generally been considered random or the result of incompetence, the dominant approach to scientificfraud has portrayed it as a rational calculation, balancing the benefits of publication against the probability and costs of detection. In our view, such rational cost-benefit perspectives give inadequate weight to the context (in our case, academic science) within which action is embedded. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/7595865/WORKINGFOLDER/PALS/9781107117716C07.3D 179 [176–202] 4.4.2016 10:50AM S/he blinded me with science: the sociology of scientific misconduct 179 Varieties of scientific wrongdoing The trend in retractions documented in Figure 7.1 subsumes a wide variety of types of scientific misconduct. We define scientificmis- conduct as behavior that violates professional or institutional norms and standards governing scientific inquiry. Scientific inquiry, in turn, includes both the planning and execution of scientificprojec- tions, as well as their dissemination. Misconduct can occur not simply in a given scientific investigation but also in the communica- tions and claims of credit associated with its findings (Meyers 2012). We find it useful to distinguish between two dimensions of scientific conduct: cognizance and agency. Cognizance captures whether indivi- duals involved understand their misconduct. Agency captures the proac- tivity involved: the degree to which misconduct reflects the commission of specific acts versus the failure to engage in some specificactions. Combining the two dimensions yields the typology shown in Table 7.1: We include negligence, error, and incompetence under the rubric of scientific wrongdoing because, like fraud and plagiarism, they contra- vene the norms and standards of scientific inquiry (even if by accident), serving thereby to erode trust in the scientific enterprise. Characterizing specific instances of misconduct along the dimensions of cognizance and agency can prove difficult,evenwithdetailedinformation about an episode and its context. Furthermore, wrongdoing can evolve over time, so that behavior that began as unintentional becomes deliberate.2 For instance, a poorly designed or ineptly executed study might (unwittingly) produce a pattern of (bogus) results in which the investigator becomes invested, to the point that, even after learning of the mistakes, he or she continues to represent the findings or the methods as legitimate. Table 7.1 A typology of scientific misconduct Commission Omission Intentional Fraud, Plagiarism Negligence Unintentional Error (or Incompetence) Incompetence 2 We thank Donald Palmer for bringing this point to our attention. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/7595865/WORKINGFOLDER/PALS/9781107117716C07.3D 180 [176–202] 4.4.2016 10:50AM 180 James N. Baron, Marissa D. King, and Olav Sorenson Case studies: not-so-great moments from the annals of science To motivate our discussion and illustrate the importance of some contextual factors in scientific wrongdoing, we first summarize three prominent cases of scientific misconduct, which vary markedly in the strength of incentives for fraud and the probability of the protagonists being detected. Suspicious social psychology: Diederick A. Stapel (weak incentives, low probability of detection) Diederik Stapel had been seen as a future star even from his early days of graduate study in psychology at the University of Amsterdam. He had developed a reputation for being a talented experimentalist who almost always got his results. Following the completion of his dissertation in 1997, his fame and fortune grew rapidly as he published nearly ten papers per year in prominent journals. Only three years after beginning his academic career at Tilburg University, he received a full professorship at the University of Groningen. Six years later, he returned to Tilburg as the head of a research institute and, in short order,
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