We need to be conscious of both the practices and people that we platform

TLDR: Even if our processes buffer us from academic misconduct, we still need to be conscious of both the practices and people that we platform. Above all else, we must be applied, behavioral, and scientific.

Yesterday on BlueSky, Neil Lewis Jr. pointed out the latest Atlantic article by Daniel Engber on academic misconduct in behavioral science, and one of the themes was compensation and the outsized benefits that come with novel findings: tenure, grants, social status, etc.

My first reaction to the article was dismissal: in my version of applied behavioral science (SIDE), where every intervention gets validated by a pilot and published studies are used only as generative prompts during the Design phase, academic misconduct doesn’t have the same scale of negative impact. If someone made something up, the pilot will show that it doesn’t work and as long as we don’t also falsify the pilot results, all it did was waste time.

But then I started thinking about our role in the attention economy. Most of us still read and debate journal articles. I talk to clients about work that brings academia closer to application, without actually being in those labs and watching that data collection. We’re not just consumers; we also use our expertise to direct attention.

A few months ago, I blocked someone on LinkedIn. We first interacted back when I published the SIDE model; they insisted that Evaluation was unnecessary if an intervention was soundly based in theory. I objected and said the whole point of science was being willing to collect evidence that might disprove a generalized theory.

We sparred a few more times, most recently when they insisted that one cognitive model was more “scientific” than another simply because it was published in an academic journal. After a few rounds of comments, I blocked them and moved on.

But sometimes they pop in my feed because we’re both included on a “who to read in applied behavioral science” list. And I have a visceral reaction every time it happens, because I don’t want what I do to ever be associated with their approach.

Applied behavioral scientists can’t just opt-out of the discourse on academic misconduct, even if our methods shelter us from its ill effects. Because as experts in our field, we still have a role in who we platform. When we say “you should follow X” or “read Y”, we’re socially endorsing it.

So what to do, in a world where you can’t validate everything? For one, use papers and case studies as examples, not rules. And be sure you’re communicating to others that what matters about those examples isn’t the phenomenon but the methodology. Our job as applied behavioral scientists is to do and teach a scientific approach to changing behavior, not to create generalizable descriptions of the world.

Be careful who and what you platform. And if someone says in public that pilots are unnecessary and whatever methodology gets published in a journal is the thing we should do…don’t put them on the same list with me.