When we were in graduate school, no one paid a whole lot of attention to ethics – neither in teaching nor in research. There were no courses on ethics in our graduate curricula and no serious informal instruction either. Human-subjects committees were starting to be formed but were viewed as nothing more than unpleasant hurdles to pass through in order to get one’s research done. Many behavioral and brain scientists today still view such committees as little more than annoyances. Yet today, ethics looms large for all behavioral and brain scientists. Here’s why.

A professor of psychology at one of the top universities in the United States, someone with a previously impeccable reputation, resigned his position following a protracted and painful scandal in which serious questions arose concerning the correct interpretation of his data. Basically, he was accused of reading into the data what he wanted to see in them, regardless of what they said. What is especially puzzling is that almost any psychologist would have been thrilled to have his reputation, or even anything close to it. Why mess with the data?

A professor of social psychology in Europe had become widely famous for his ingenious experiments and his compelling results. He was not only a star in academia but a media darling as well. Today he too is out of a job because it turned out that he not only faked his data but also even faked experiments – claiming to have run experiments that were never executed.