Max Bazerman
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
Publishers earn more from publishing more.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
When there's somebody who engages in bad behavior, there's always people around who could have noticed more and acted more.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
part of the path toward data fabrication occurred in part because he liked complex ideas. And academia didn't like complex ideas as much as they liked the snappy sort of clickbait. And that moved him in that direction and also put him on a path toward fraudulent behavior.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
And journalists love that stuff. They lap it up. Like signing a document at the top will make you more likely to be honest on the form?
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
So, you know, when we think about Ponzi schemes... It's named after a guy named Ponzi, who was an Italian-American who preyed on the Italian-American community. And if we think about Bernie Madoff, he preyed on lots of people, but particularly many very wealthy Jewish individuals and organizations. One of the interesting things about trust is that it creates so many wonderful opportunities.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
So in the academic world, the fact that I can trust my colleagues means that we can diffuse the work to the person who can handle it best. So there's lots of enormous benefits from trust. But it's also true that if there is somebody out there who's going to commit a fraud of any type, those of us who are trusting that individual are perhaps in the worst position to notice that something's wrong.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
And quite honestly, Stephen, you know, I've been working with junior colleagues who are smarter than me and know how to do a variety of tasks better than me for such a long time, I've always trusted them. Certainly for junior colleagues, for the most new doctoral students, I may not have trusted their competence because they were still learning.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
But in terms of using the word trust in an ethical sense, I've never questioned the ethics of my colleagues. So this current episode has really hit me pretty heavily.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
Undoubtedly, I was naive. You know, not only did I trust my colleagues on the signing first paper, but I think I've trusted my colleagues for decades. And hopefully, with a good basis for trusting them, I do want to highlight that there's so many benefits of trust. So the world has... done a lot better because we trust science.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
And the fact that there's an occasional scientist who we shouldn't trust should not keep us from gaining the benefit that science creates. And so one of the harms created by the fraudsters is that they give credibility to the science deniers who are so often keeping us from making progress in society.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
I think that my generation fought against the open science movement for far too long. And it's time that we get on the bandwagon and realize that we need some pretty massive reform of how social science is done, not only to improve the quality of social science, but also to make us more credible with the world.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
So many of us are attracted to social science because we think we can make the world better. And we can't make the world better if the world doesn't believe our results anymore. So I think that we have a fundamental challenge to figure out, how do we go about doing that?
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
In terms of training, I think that for a long time, if we think about training and research methods and statistics, that was more like the medicine that you have to take as part of becoming a social scientist. And I think we need to realize that it's a much more central and important topic.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
If we're going to be creating reproducible, credible social science, we need to deal with lots of the issues that the open science movement is telling us about. And we've taken too long to listen to their advice. So if we go from Data Colada talking about p-hacking in 2011, you know, there were lots of hints that it was time to start moving.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
And the field obviously has moved in the direction that Data Cloud and Brian Nosek have moved us. And finally, we have Samin Vazir as a new incoming editor of Psych Science, which is sort of a fascinating development as well. So we're moving in the right direction. It's taken us too long to pay attention to the wise advice that the open science movement has outlined for us.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
I do think there needs to be a reckoning.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
I would say we don't know that much about why the fraudsters do what they do. And the most interesting source you just mentioned. So Stapel wrote a book in Dutch called Outsporing, which means something like derailed, where he provides his information and he goes on from the material you talked about to describing that he became like an alcoholic or a heroin addict.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
And he got used to the easy successes, and he began to believe that he wasn't doing any harm. After all, he was just making it easier to publish information that was undoubtedly true. So this aspect of sort of being lured onto the path of unethical behavior followed by addictive-like behavior, behavior becomes part of the story.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
And Stapel goes on to talk about lots of other aspects, like the need to score, ambition, laziness, wanting power, status. So he provides us good insight. But most of the admitted fraudsters, or the people who have lost their university positions based on allegations of fraud, have simply disappeared and have never talked about it.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
One of the interesting parts is that Mark Hauser, who resigned from Harvard, And Ariely and Gino, who are alleged to have committed fraud by some parties, all three of them wrote on the topic of moral behavior and specifically why people might engage in bad behavior.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
We once even got to the point of our two families making an offer to a developer on a project to have houses connected to each other.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
You've written that universities protect fraudsters. Can you give an example other than Bolt, let's say?
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
And there is misconduct everywhere, from the universities.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
Because most people, if they're caught at all, they skate. There's misconduct at academic journals, some of which are essentially fake.