Professor Gert Cornelissen (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Seminar Tittle: Ethics and ethics in research

The grey zone in analyzing and reporting data –from massaging data to torturing them into confession.

Recent cases of data fraud in the social sciences have fired up the debate on scientific etiquette in analyzing and reporting data. There is a wide “grey zone” or more or less commonly used statistical tools which provide ways to apply a layer of cosmetics to research output. Opinions diverge on how acceptable those practices are. We will review a number of those techniques and discuss their potential to produce “false positive” results.

The self and moral dynamics – how to make sense of different patterns of moral behavior?

A hot topic in different fields of research, such as social psychology, consumer behavior, and organizational behavior is moral dynamics. Moral dynamics refers to how ethical behavior fluctuates over time. In other words, how does doing something (un)ethical now affects the likelihood I will behave ethical later on. Older literature emphasized consistency effects. Persuasion principles such as the foot-in-the-door technique rely on the fact that people tend to repeat previous actions. Recent research, however, has convincingly demonstrated that the opposite might occur as well. After doing the ethically appropriate thing, I may give myself a break, and doing whatever benefits me, irrespective of the ethical implications. This phenomenon is called moral licensing. We will discuss previous research in both areas and think of ways to reconcile them. In other words, we will look for moderators of either effect.