After browsing the website for the office of Research and Integrity, I would like to talk about one program named the Research on Research Integrity Program. This program mainly encourages to submit research proposal for investigating the integrity in research.
As we know, integrity is also the first to be considered for a person, especially for a researcher and teacher. For our hokies, we have the honor codes that regulates every hokie to be honest and integrity. As a Ph.D. student, I am also trained to follow the academic regulations such as how to quote others’ work and how to set up a reference.
This program attracts me not only its topic about research integrity but also different fields are applied to this topic such as psychology, behavioral analysis and health services research. Currently, I am working on contingent valuation research which applies the survey as a tool to investigate people’s actions when they faced with a contingency situation. If integrity is investigated, surveying respondents from different groups will be very helpful to get the necessary information for future analysis.
Also, experiment design aiming at respondents’ behaviors will also be helpful in investigating people’s integrity. Nowadays, behavioral economics is an innovative field which applies experiments, economics and psychology together. Maybe it is more precise to set up an experiment design in the lab to test people’s choice when they faced with different scenarios and then we can analyze experimental results with econometric models. Particularly, we can start from students in Virginia Tech to design a solid experiment and then spread this experiment to other groups such as researchers, instructors and employee.
I am highly interested in investigating people’ integrity and wonder if I can apply economic theories, econometric models and people’ s minds together. By revealing people’s minds and behaviors, it is more possible for researchers to develop a better way to improve integrity and social welfare.
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The research you describe is actually already happening at Virginia Tech! There’s a new Behavioral Sciences program being developed between the economics and psychology departments. Undergrads soon will be able to major in behavioral sciences, which is a degree that more and more companies are seeing the value in. Software giants like Amazon and Apple have become more interested in how people make choices so that they can profit off of our tendencies. The research going on at VT is more along the lines of what you described, though – studying people with the goal of making them more honest. Andrea Pittarello has done some work investigating why people engage in dishonest behaviors, and he is now studying what we can do to increase people’s integrity.
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This is a very interesting post as I feel like it involves a lot of almost the psychology as to how people think and behave in certain situations and how they react. I also like how you are able to relate this back to Research and Integrity and understand how people’s minds work in terms of this area and how we may be able to use this information to improve integrity as a whole. My only question is, while I understand that this is possible, but how exactly will we be able to use this information about how people react and behave, and then channel that into making them have better integrity? How do we use this information (understanding people’s behaviour), to achieve our desired outcome (improving integrity as a whole)?
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This is a very interesting post as I feel like it involves a lot of almost the psychology as to how people think and behave in certain situations and how they react. I also like how you are able to relate this back to Research and Integrity and understand how people’s minds work in terms of this area and how we may be able to use this information to improve integrity as a whole. My only question is, while I understand that this is possible, but how exactly will we be able to use this information about how people react and behave, and then channel that into making them have better integrity? How do we use this information (understanding people’s behaviour), to achieve our desired outcome (improving integrity as a whole)?
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I wonder if surveys are accurate ways to study behavior on integrity. If the people who are behaving badly, 1. why would they fill out a survey to define how their actions align with societal values and 2. if they did fill it out, would they be honest about their actual behavior and motivations? I assume anonymity will allow some of this to be negated but if a person acts dishonestly, I don’t see why they would then be truthful about it.
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I really enjoyed reading this post as it brings up new ideas surrounding integrity that I think most of us don’t focus on. Often we are educated on “right” from “wrong” and the implications of research wrong-doings are outlined, but rarely do we talk about WHY those unethical decisions are made in the first place. I agree that this is a valuable area for research, with the hope that once the behavior behind such unethical decisions is revealed, we can work to counteract the process that involves making these decisions. I think that there are many underlying factors here including culture, researcher personality and mental status that are overlooked. I think we can then work to better educate researchers in a way that makes the right choice easier and the wrong choice harder – further widening the gap between right and wrong and decreasing the gray area.
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It was very interesting to read your article as an approach to research integrity. This make me think that human knowledge can be improved in many areas including figure out the parameters for integrity among people. Also, I believe ethics have a nuance meaning depending on culture, education, upbring and other things, so the establishment of integrity thresholds is of potential importance.
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