I was in a behavioral economics class today, and the teacher mentioned a recent article that talked about how some academics had been faking their data. There is a lot of pressure in academics to get published, and to write papers with interesting results. And so some people manipulate their data in order to get those results.

I did my own study a while back. The results were not conclusive. There wasn’t really much of a statistical effect. And that’s pretty normal, because when you study humans and human behavior, the main result from any study at all is that people vary.

But that isn’t very interesting. So people lie instead. And then there are a whole lot of studies out there that can’t be replicated and don’t mean anything.

There is one pretty well-known study about fines and daycare. The paper says that when late fines were introduced into a daycare system, this actually caused an increase of late parents. But if you look into the study more, it hasn’t been replicated (and some other studies suggest that fines do deter behavior just fine). The data and reporting may not be entirely accurate. So while the result is interesting, it may simply be a fiction.

Scholars need to be more honest when data doesn’t come up with any results. But we also need to be more honest about how most of the results of human behavior studies aren’t that conclusive.

And people need to just be more honest in general.

I’ve been grading a lot of student assignments, and I think at least 5% of the students use artificial intelligence to either help with or do the assignments for them. This is against the class policies. Maybe that’s not a big percentage, but it might be a lot higher, as it can be difficult to actually determine if someone is using A.I. or not. I spend a lot more time grading because I have to try to figure out who is using A.I. or not. It’s not the usage of A.I. that is necessarily a problem, but the dishonesty of passing off A.I. as their own work.

Sometimes I don’t want to trust anymore. I don’t want to trust scholars who have incentives to make up their data. I don’t want to trust students to act with academic integrity.

But I have to trust. And I know that a world where I can’t trust anyone would be absolutely miserable.

I need to work on my own honestly sometimes–I don’t generally lie, but sometimes I will remain silent. Sometimes I need to open up, speak up, and be more vulnerable about where I am at and what I am struggling with.

Maybe some of this dishonest comes from these pressures to perform: publish papers, go to school, get good grades, be successful. And struggling doesn’t feel like an option. Coming up with inclusive results isn’t an option. Running out of time to do an assignment isn’t an option.

We need to be more okay with failure. We need to expect it in the people around us and expect it in ourselves because it’s going to happen. And that expectation can make honesty so much easier.