It sounds more like another day in vegas for the psychology field of that era. This was not an exception, and often researchers were not even aware they were doing something wrong. Even nowadays psychology researchers are clueless as to what really p-hacking and bad statistical practices mean. And because they consider themselves honest researchers, while these practices are obviously dishonest, they do not consider themselves actually doing anything like that - but somebody else may! it is always somebody else. Now it is not as bad as that period, and there is more awareness about the most blunt violations of statistical rigour, but the actual understanding is still low for the median researcher so many grey-to-black zones exist still.
Incentives determine outcomes. Most grad students are grad students because they are responding to incentives. It's competitive so cheating is ubiquituous. Reduce competition in academia and problems would lessen.
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It sounds more like another day in vegas for the psychology field of that era. This was not an exception, and often researchers were not even aware they were doing something wrong. Even nowadays psychology researchers are clueless as to what really p-hacking and bad statistical practices mean. And because they consider themselves honest researchers, while these practices are obviously dishonest, they do not consider themselves actually doing anything like that - but somebody else may! it is always somebody else. Now it is not as bad as that period, and there is more awareness about the most blunt violations of statistical rigour, but the actual understanding is still low for the median researcher so many grey-to-black zones exist still.
Unfortunately true. In other words: "often researchers were too stupid to ever have been let into university as freshmen".
Incentives determine outcomes. Most grad students are grad students because they are responding to incentives. It's competitive so cheating is ubiquituous. Reduce competition in academia and problems would lessen.