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Adventures in Ethics and Science

Authored by stemwedel,   website: scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience

• Member: Since 05/19/2008
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Latest Blog Post

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?