Unethical Practises

Whilst bullshitting my chemistry report and preparing to fabricate data for my psychology report, I start to wonder whether the "real" scientists do this kind of stuff as well. I've done quite a few chemistry reports up until now, and I've always "modified" the data so that it was convenient. Nobody wants to explain their 120% experimental error, after all. 3.05 seconds? That's surely the same as 4.50 seconds. I know that you can discount outliers in an experiment: however, what if there's no correlation, and every single result obtained could be considered an outlier? If I were an honest person, I would state that there was no correlation to be found- but do I really want to go against the masses, and say that, NOPE, THE CONCENTRATION HAS NO EFFECT ON THE RATE OF REACTION. No thank you, I want my marks.

Do I feel guilty, doing all this? Nope, not at all. I've never considered myself a scientist, after all. More like an unwilling science student, if anything. If science wasn't so easy to pass, I might've done something else. It's not like me rigging a school science experiment is going to alter the lives of millions. I'm just trying to obtain convenient results. Every textbook tells me that my experiment isn't doing what it's supposed to- maybe I've struck on an amazing discovery- maybe I could prove everybody wrong! But I don't really care. It's more likely that one of the chemicals I used has expired or something.

So what about the "real" scientists out there? They would have stronger ethical principles than me, right? After all, this is "the real deal". When I think about it though- probably not. I have no reason to think that they have a more righteous moral inclination. The greatest scientists are those who can pursue what they want- and more importantly- have the money to pursue what they want. What about those scientists who get hired to do lab experiments and write reports all day, just so their research could be published under a different name, and credited to a different person?  Sure, they get paid for it--- but maybe that's the problem. Imagine, your boss is driving you for results- and there are no bloody results to be found. Nobody wants to hear that they've just thrown money at a futile cause. If a few data points could be tweaked, maybe it can be argued that there is a weak correlation- or the initially weak correlation can be changed to a moderately strong correlation---

Yup, there is definitely a correlation between your blood type, the fact that you believe in blood type personality determinants and your level of mental retardation.

Living in this material world of ours- wouldn't it be nice if the results showed what we wanted to see? Unless it's a clinical trial, perhaps it wouldn't matter if the data was a little bit off? If one experiment gave results which were different from every other source- and the other results are the ones you wanted- perhaps the results of this particular experiment could be changed?

...Or maybe only I would think like this. Either way, don't think I'm cut out to be a scientist. Imagine if I led research on nuclear weaponry or something...