1 What evil lurks in the hearts of scientists? Behavioral ecologist Daniele Fanelli knows. In a meta-analysis of 18 surveys of researchers, he found only 2 percent ’fessed up to falsifying or manipulating data...but 14 percent said they knew a colleague who had.
2 After studying retracted biology papers published between 2000 and 2010, neurobiologist R. Grant Steen claimed that Americans were significantly more prone to commit fraud than scientists from other nations.
3 But when two curious bloggers reanalyzed Steen’s data, they found that American’s aren’t so shifty after all.
4 Chinese scientists were actually three times as likely as Americans to commit fraud. (French researchers were least likely to misbehave.)
5 If caught stealing someone else’s ideas, scientists have a handy defense: cryptomnesia, the idea that a person can experience a memory as a new, original thought.
6 But there’s no shortage of excuses. In the 1970s the ...
