Reportedly, a lot of people who choose to study psychology are motivated originally to figure out what's going on in their own heads (which they have a sense is not quite normal) [1]. I wonder if there's a similar dynamic with "honesty / ethics": people who lack a native impulse to be honest / ethical and are curious about people who do.
Alternative, and more likely imo, hypothesis is that attaining and maintaining the social (and probably $$$) capital of being a "Harvard Expert" leads to desperation and breaking the rules.
Sure, that might have been the "trigger"; but that's missing the key thing that needs to be explained. If this were dishonesty by someone doing chemistry, it's unlikely that this would have hit the front page of HN. As they say, "Dog bites man isn't a story; man bites dog is."
But a priori, you'd expect someone studying honesty* to personally care about honesty, and thus to be less likely to give in to these sorts of pressures. That's the thing that needs to be explained; the "man bites dog" aspect.
> As they say, "Dog bites man isn't a story; man bites dog is."
The headline is just making fun of theory and practice. If some is a murder expert, is that some one who understands murder or someone highly qualified to kill people?
Therefore, the title is about a "dishonesty expert" matching the practice, not about a "honesty expert", which could be replaced by any other field.
Reminds me of the grad student in criminology who allegedly committed a brutal multiple murder in Moscow, Idaho. He got caught, so I guess he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.
> But a priori, you'd expect someone studying honestly to personally care about honestly, and thus to be less likely to give in to these sorts of pressures.
I'm not so sure you can automatically assume this. You can definitely assume that the subject interests them.
But it's also possible that someone studying honesty/dishonesty might start seeing the subject in academic/technical terms instead of moral terms. Which may give them much less of a disincentive to be dishonest than the average person.
Which is to say that repeated studying and analysis of instances where people are dishonest may break down the gut reaction people have to being dishonest.
I didn't say one should assume it, just that many people do. "Chemistry researcher committed fraud" is simply not the same as "Dishonesty expert committed fraud".
You give an alternate explanation, but it's still an explanation; one which wouldn't be needed (and indeed wouldn't apply) to a chemistry researcher.
A variation on your explanation might be: Dishonesty researchers discover just how easy it is for dishonest people to cheat the system, and how little consequence there is, and so is more tempted to be dishonest.
> But a priori, you'd expect someone studying honestly to personally care about honestly
But then, why study honesty if you already know what it is?
For me, this sort of thing - an honesty expert - is in the same realm as 'ethics panels'.
These folk are there to abuse edge case arguments (think "trolley problem") in order to provide moral cover for corporations to act dishonestly, unethically. And they will provide documentation in support. CEOs will just do what they wanted, but call it "moral" tm.
Probably the most important reason this story got big is because it involved Dan Ariely, a popular author and perhaps the most famous active researcher in the world.
Yes, my experience with academics is that there are a lot of very dishonest people. They are political bullies who also lie in their research.
Chances of being caught are close to zero (I have contacted many times authors of papers who's work I was unable to replicate - most of the time zero reply, sometimes "yeah it was a honest mistake, oops"), super high competition (only a few tenured positions in all world's high visibility institutions per year), full control over student's future and being able to force them to do fraud (and later blame on them).
Obviously, not all, blah blah - but many academic scientists are the last people that should be doing science.
I think it's more likely that psychology offers a lot of potentially marketable propositions, such as lie detection, effective lying, covert behavioral control, secret information about the movements of financial markets, etc. Therefore, a lot of snake oil is sold, and people's careers advance proportionally to the amount of snake oil they can sell.
The job has often been to come up with a marketable theory; to design experiments and write papers to imply that that theory is true without quite proving it; and to avoid the possibility, through any means, that someone will weaken or disprove the theory.
Interesting hypothesis but my money is on the opposite direction of causality. When you're surrounded by dishonesty on a daily basis, you get de-sensitized to it. You start to see it as "normal" or as "everyone does it". And then you start to think "Oh, what's the harm if I just fudge a little bit here and there. It's not like I'm profiting off of this. Unlike all these other millionaires who do far worse"
Sure, it's easy for us to think "I would never do anything like that, no matter what others around me are doing". But as someone who has lived in multiple countries, trust me - the vast majority of the things we do are simply a reflection of what we see other people doing.
> Reportedly, a lot of people who choose to study psychology are motivated originally to figure out what's going on in their own heads
People who go into psychology are more interested in what's going on in other people's heads and more importantly manipulating other people. It's more about controlling others than controlling oneself. It's why psychology was founded in the first place.
> people who lack a native impulse to be honest / ethical and are curious about people who do.
Ethics isn't about studying people. It's about studying principles. IE what does ethics mean. What makes an act ethical vs non-ethical. So on. You can delve into the ethics of gods, god, AI or even animals. Are ethical principles universal or not. So on and so forth.
[1] See e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39703638 from yesterday