The February 22 Lab Seminar was led by Brandi Newell and Alek Chakroff. Both Newell and Chakroff are Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellows, and PhD candidates in the Harvard Psychology Department, and their research examines issues of institutional corruption in academic research. While much of the research on institutional corruption focuses on external special interests, Newell and Chakroff are interested in the interaction between researchers and their own egos, as well as the implicit biases that allow one to engage in corrupt behavior without recognizing it as such.
Bias can enter in the design phase, data collection, analysis and interpretation, or publication of a scientific study. Newell and Chakroff are particularly interested in studying the effect of bias on the analysis and interpretation stages of the process. Analysis decisions are not always clear, as there may be multiple options, with no clearly “correct” choice. In such situations when there is “moral wiggle room”, bias may sway a researcher to drop certain outliers, or run their statistical analyses in a particular way that provides results to confirm their hypothesis. Other issues may arise during the interpretation of results, when barely significant findings may be presented in terms that make them sound more significant than they actually are.
Participants noted that many of these problems arise due to publication and tenure constraints. Some suggested that PhD students be required to run replication studies as part of their degree requirement. Others mentioned trying to change the academic culture so that having a number of studies that replicate your findings is viewed with the same importances as having been prolific in your own original research and publications.
It was noted that fraudulent practices in academic research can have the effect of pushing out the “good” researchers, who may appear less productive than their colleagues who use fraudulent methods to obtain compelling results. Ultimately, many agreed that the root of the issue seems to lie in the expectations and pressures that universities put on professors, should they hope to make tenure.