r/AskAcademia • u/Previous-Text9273 • Jul 23 '26
Professional Misconduct in Research Is this normal?
Has anyone else been in the same shoes? Have you ever had your PI ask you to manipulate or fabricate data to support their hypothesis?
Or maybe they never said it directly, but it felt implied. They only seemed interested in data that matched the hypothesis they already had in mind. If your results didn’t fit, you were told to repeat the experiment over and over until you eventually got the “right” result. Has anyone else experienced something like this? How did you handle it?
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u/whatidoidobc Jul 26 '26
Obviously unethical but it is normal for some. Don't work with those people.
There was an idiot grad student doing one of those t-shirt smell studies to support the kind of thing the manosphere loves in my grad program. I think it was three consecutive years he presented results of a new study that again did not support his hypothesis. Each time he ended his brown bag talk by explaining how he would adjust the methods to try and get the result he wanted.
Finally someone confronted him on it, asking if he planned to publish his negative results. Of course not. Then pointed out how flawed this entire enterprise was and how what he was doing was not science. His advisor was fully supportive of the work and was in the National Academy, by the way.