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.

Continue reading→

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?

Continue reading→

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)

Continue reading→