My son began second grade this season. He has been in school for three weeks and has reported over once of the fact that boy who sits next to him "copies my answers to his spelling test. He takes my paper in order that he can look at my words." So the cheating has started.
I start with a real and tragic story. A few years ago I was a university student conducting study in one of the excellent biopsychology laboratories in the country. The lab leader was one of a few of the world's most outstanding investigate psychologists at that time. As is often the case, this lab head was not doing hands-on investigation himself. He was busy writing posts and grant proposals and traveling around giving speeches. A fleet of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows conducted the study. He would put his name on reports of study that he had helped to design but that other people had executed. He didn't even know completely the equipment which was used in those experiments.
I wasn't that surprised to hear this. I feel bad for him. I also feel bad for my daughter who has a different strategy for dealing with the stress of spelling tests. Although she finds first grade easy, she has had a meltdown each Thursday since school started. Each time, as the crying resolves, she gets around to asking me to estimate mad I would be if she ever got a "check-minus." Instead of cheating to reduce the chances that she'll get a poor grade, she has developed anxiety about being graded.
What a shock that was to me. I can't say that I really liked Henry; his ambition was such that he rubbed those who were beneath him, including me, the wrong way. But I knew him and felt I understood him. He was a real flesh and blood person to me, and when I heard of his suicide I cried. I could see him as a frail person despite his burly physique and blustering style caught up in a drive toward self-advancement, in a lab that was rewarding the "right" findings and had little interest in the "wrong" ones. He was not, in truth, a scientist at all. He wasn't interested in the questions he was supposedly pursuing in the lab. When the foundation for his self-advancement was pulled out from under him he toppled; he could no longer see any purpose in living.
I've been thinking lately about the whole question of cheating in science. It has been brought to mind, of course, by the recent media coverage of the Marc Hauser case at Harvard. Hauser is accused of fabricating data in at least some of his celebrated experiments on the cognitive abilities of monkeys. The Hauser case is reminiscent of another case of scientific fraud that also occurred in the Harvard Psychology Department. In the late-1990s, fast-rising Harvard psychologist Karen Ruggiero was found guilty of fabricating five experiments, which had been published in two articles, and of altering the data that appeared in a third article. Her career was destroyed.
How common is scientific fraud? Nobody really knows. Defenders of science's purity often argue that such fraud is very rare, the product of a tiny number of "bad apples." But I doubt that. My suspicion is that the cases of fraud that are exposed are just the tip of the iceberg.
Even in the case of Henry, where every attempt was made to keep conditions exactly the same as those in the original experiments, the researchers continued to "explain" the failure, at least publicly, in terms of hypothetical changed conditions. They suggested in one article, for example, that the company from which they obtained the rats may have been breeding the animals in a way that had altered their behavioral reactions. My guess is that if Henry had remained alive and had been formally accused of fraud, nobody would have been able to prove it.
Proof of fraud in science rarely if ever comes from failure to replicate. It comes, most often, when the perpetrator of the fraud becomes so brazen that he or she fabricates or alters data in ways that make the fraud obvious to others. Hauser was caught, apparently, because he began to pressure his graduate students to get the results he wanted, which led them to become whistleblowers, which, in turn, led to an investigation revealing that his recorded data did not match that in his published papers.
Some other scientists have been caught cheating because their fabricated data, quite literally, was too good to be true. There is always a certain degree of random variability in real data, and repeated data sets that have no or almost no variability are powerful evidence of fabrication. You have to be either very brazen or very stupid to get caught at cheating in science.
Over the years a number of surveys have been conducted in which scientists were asked to report, on an anonymous questionnaire, on their own fraudulent behavior. A recent meta-analysis of those surveys reveals that, on average, about 3% of scientists admitted to fabricating or falsifying data, and 15% said that they had personal evidence of such behavior in one or more of their colleagues. The percentage admitting to fraud was highest among scientists doing pharmaceutical, clinical, and other medical research, which either means that researchers in those fields fabricate lab data more often or lie less often on questionnaires than do researchers in other fields.
As the author of the meta-analysis, Daniele Fanelli, points out, the 2% figure is the lowest possible estimate of the percentage of scientists who have deliberately falsified data. No respondents would say that they had behaved fraudulently if they hadn't, but many, even on an anonymous questionnaire, might be expected to lie in the opposite direction. The meta-analysis also revealed that a full third of the respondents to the surveys admitted to more subtle forms of scientific cheating, such as failing to report data that contradicted their theories or dropping data points from analyses because of a "gut feeling" that they were inaccurate.
The aim to science is to find truths. Cheating totally defeats the purpose. Why, then, do scientists cheat? In their minds, really scientists. Instead, they are still college students, going through one loop after another to reach the following level. To them, dishonest in science is just like cheating at school, and "Who doesn't do that?"
It is my opinion that you can't cheat in your methodology and still be fraudulent. For that reason I believe dishonest on exams and being deceitful in your work are some totally different things. Cheating on exams is a response to stress or sometimes just the thrill of getting away with something bad and unsafe, but scams goes deeper than that. Kids are not deceitful and I don't take their cheating as some kind of ethical shortcoming.
Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches brazil soccer jersey and juicy couture wallet on the Internet.
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