Questionable research practises in psychological research: some evidence

The ever interesting British Psychological Society Research Digest discusses here an article forthcoming in Psychological Science which documents questionable research practises in psychology based on an anonymous survey of 2000 academics. It comes on foot of the revelation of serious and persistent fraud by a social psychologist in the Netherlands.

Research in economics differs from psychology in number of ways. In particular, we are much less likely to collect our own data and less likely to do experiments. Nonetheless there are plenty of oportunities for dubious if not outright fraudulent practises. It would be good if someone tried to quantify this.

I suspect that the selective reporting of results, cherry-picking, is the most common form of malpractice. As far as I know, when people try to replicate others’ econometric results the track record is not good.

Say a little prayer

Being able to trust people is important. Yet dishonesty is pervasive. In Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational book he describes this as a tragedy of the commons problem since dishonest people or companies lower the level of trust generally. So what to do?
One simple solution is priming. In a series of experiments, Ariely and co-authors Mazar & Amir had subjects think about the 10 Commandments (the actual commandments & not the movie of the same name) before completing a task and being rewarded for their success where they had the opportunity to cheat. Sure enough they cheated significantly less than the controls. It turns out that there are more than 10 commandments in the 10 commandments since they differ between Catholic, Protestant and Jewish faiths: only Catholics are required not to covet their neighbours' wives for example.
There is a curious angle to all this since the presence of a monument displaying the 10 commandments on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol (pictured) and also in a Kentucky courthouse generated long-running and heated court battles that reached the US Supreme Court. Whatever about the legal merits of the case (which centers on the separation of church and state and on the freedom of speech) it seems possible from the experimental evidence that the presence of the monument (and similar monuments) might generate more honest behaviour in these important contexts. Wouldn't that be a good thing?