Injustice, misbehavior, and the scientist’s social identity (part 3).

Let’s wrap up our discussion on the Martinson et al. paper, “Scientists’ Perceptions of Organizational Justice and Self-Reported Misbehaviors”. [1] You’ll recall that the research in this paper examined three hypotheses about academic scientists:

Hypothesis 1: The greater the perceived distributive injustice in science, the greater the likelihood of a scientist engaging in misbehavior. (51)

Hypothesis 2: The greater the perceived procedural injustice in science, the greater the likelihood of a scientist engaging in misbehavior. (52)

Hypothesis 3: Perceptions of injustice are more strongly associated with misbehavior among those for whom the injustice represents a more serious threat to social identity (e.g., early-career scientists, female scientists in traditionally male fields). (52)

We’ve already looked at the methodological details of the study. We’ve also examined the findings Martinson et al. reported. (In short, they found that early-career and mid-career scientists reported more procedural injustice than distributive injustice; that early-career scientists who perceived high levels of distributive injustice were somewhat more likely to report engaging in misbehavior than those who did not; that misbehavior was most likely from mid-career scientists with high intrinsic drive who perceived a high level of procedural injustice; and that female scientists were less likely to engage in misbehavior than male scientists.)

In this post, we’re going to consider what these findings mean, and what larger conclusions can be drawn from them.

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Blogger Challenge 2008 sprog thank-you art: dragonflies.

A generous donor who prefers to remain anonymous made a contribution to my challenge and requested some artwork from the sprogs. In particular, the donor requested dragonflies:

Many species are considered vulnerable or imperiled by the Nature Conservancy (Species Report Card) and it’s my next animal group to target for outreach and conservation. …
Please post the jpg image on your website for awareness of dragonflies… I don’t want any recognition for me. Please acknowledge the little artist with teh mad skillz though! We need entomologists to describe and name all the new species we are overlooking – maybe inspiration will happen with your readers and the bug-loving schoolkids:)

The sprogs and I offer our heartfelt thanks, and the pictures:

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Schwarzenegger signs Researcher Protection Act of 2008.

The past couple years in California have been scary ones for academic researchers who conduct research with animals (as well as for their neighbors), what with firebombs, home invasions, significant intentional damage to their properties and threats to their safety.
In response to a ratcheting up of attacks from animals rights groups, universities have lobbied for the Researcher Protection Act of 2008, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law on September 28.

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Injustice, misbehavior, and the scientist’s social identity (part 2).

Last week, we started digging into a paper by Brian C. Martinson, Melissa S. Anderson, A. Lauren Crain, and Raymond De Vries, “Scientists’ Perceptions of Organizational Justice and Self-Reported Misbehaviors”. [1] . The study reported in the paper was aimed at exploring the connections between academic scientists’ perceptions of injustice (both distributive and procedural) and those scientists engaging in scientific misbehavior. In particular, the researchers were interested in whether differences would emerge between scientists with fragile social identities within the tribe of academic science and those with more secure social identities. At the outset, the researchers expected that scientists at early career stages and female scientists in male-dominated fields would be the most likely to have fragile social identities. They hypothesized that perceptions of injustice would increase the likelihood of misbehaving, and that this link would be even greater among early-career scientists and female scientists.

We started with a post walking through the methodology of the study. In this post, we’ll examine the results Martinson et al. reported. Part 3 will then consider what conclusions we might draw from these findings.

First, how much injustice did the study participants report?

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DVD review: Veterinarians – Speaking for Research.

Vet_DVD.jpg
Americans for Medical Progress has produced a new DVD titled Veterinarians – Speaking for Research. (You can get your own free copy at the Americans for Medical Progress website.)
You might consider this DVD a follow-up of their previous DVD, Physicians – Speaking for Research (reviewed here). However, the two are pretty different, perhaps suggesting some differences not only in the intended audiences for the DVDs (veterinarians vs. physicians) but also in the concerns of the segments of the public each set of professionals is likely to encounter.
In this post, I’ll first discuss Veterinarians – Speaking for Research. Then, I’ll examine some interesting ways it differs from Physicians – Speaking for Research.

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Friday Sprog Blogging: of skin and senators.

As I was kissing the sprogs goodnight last night:
Younger offspring: If we get boo-boos more than seven times, do we not heal any more?
Elder offspring: Huh?
Younger offspring: Well, if we have seven layers of skin*, once you get cut or scraped in the same place the seventh time, don’t you use the last layer? After that, don’t you run out of skin?

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DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2008: more ScienceBloggers roll out challenges.

We’re in day 2 of our month-long drive to fund projects in public school classrooms across the U.S. As I write this post, the generous readers of ScienceBloggers have given a total of $5,589. And, since yesterday, challenges have been mounted by:
Dispatches from the Culture Wars (challenge here)
Signout (challenge here)
The World’s Fair (challenge here)
Zooillogix (challenge here)
Check out the ScienceBlog leaderboard to follow our progress. And thanks for being such a generous bunch of blog readers!

Injustice, misbehavior, and the scientist’s social identity (part 1).

Regular readers know that I frequently blog about cases of scientific misconduct or misbehavior. A lot of times, discussions about problematic scientific behavior are framed in terms of interactions between individual scientists — and in particular, of what a individual scientist thinks she does or does not owe another individual scientist in terms of honesty and fairness.

In fact, the scientists in the situations we discuss might also conceive of themselves as responding not to other individuals so much as to “the system”. Unlike a flesh and blood colleague, “the system” is faceless, impersonal. “The system” is what you have to work within — or around.

Could scientists feel the same sort of loyalty or accountability to “the system” as they do to other individual scientists? How do scientists’ views of the fairness or unfairness of “the system” impact how they will behave toward it?

It is this last question that is the focus of a piece of research reported by Brian C. Martinson, Melissa S. Anderson, A. Lauren Crain, and Raymond De Vries in the paper “Scientists’ Perceptions of Organizational Justice and Self-Reported Misbehaviors” . [1] Focusing specifically on the world of the academic scientist, they ask, if you feel like the system won’t give you a fair break, is your behavior within it more likely to drift into misbehavior? Their findings suggest that the answer to this question is “yes”:

Our findings indicate that when scientists believe they are being treated unfairly they are more likely to behave in ways that compromise the integrity of science. Perceived violations of distributive and procedural justice were positively associated with self-reports of misbehavior among scientists. (51)

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Fabulous prizes for your donation to my DonorsChoose challenge.

You already know that we’re working with DonorsChoose to raise some money for public school teachers who are trying to give their students the engaging educational experiences they deserve. You also know that our benevolent overlords at Seed will be randomly selecting some donors to receive nifty prizes (details about this to be posted as soon as I get them).
As I did last year, I’m going sweeten the deal by offering some incentive to everyone who donates to my challenge. And I’m adding a few new options this time around. Here’s what you can get:

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