Bounded research ethicality - Lina Koppel

Abstract: Bounded ethicality refers to people’s limited capacity to consistently behave in line with their ethical standards. Here, we present results from a pre-registered, large-scale (N = 11,050) survey of researchers in Sweden, suggesting that researchers too are boundedly ethical. Specifically, researchers on average rated themselves as better than other researchers in their field at following good research practice, and rated researchers in their own field as better than researchers in other fields at following good research practice. These effects were stable across all academic fields, but strongest among researchers in the medical sciences. Taken together, our findings illustrate inflated self-righteous beliefs among researchers and research disciplines when it comes to research ethics, which may contribute to academic polarization and moral blind spots regarding one’s own and one’s colleagues’ use of questionable research practices.
Bio: Lina Koppel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Division of Economics, Department of Management and Engineering, Linköping University. She received her PhD in Medical Science from Linköping University in 2020, and before that a Master’s in psychology from Lund University. Her research investigates everyday decision making and its underlying processes, with a focus on the role of affect. She also conducts research in metascience, particularly on topics relating to replicability and reproducibility in research.