Interesting study here:
College students who cheated on a simple task were more likely to want government jobs, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania found in a study of hundreds of students in Bangalore, India.
Their results, recently released as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggest that one of the contributing forces behind government corruption could be who gets into government work in the first place.
…Researchers ran a series of experiments with more than 600 students finishing up college in India. In one task, students had to privately roll a die and report what number they got. The higher the number, the more they would get paid. Each student rolled the die 42 times.
Although researchers do not know for sure if any one student lied, they could tell whether the numbers each person reported were wildly different than what would turn up randomly — in other words, whether there were a suspiciously high number of 5s and 6s in their results.
Cheating seemed to be rampant: More than a third of students had scores that fell in the top 1% of the predicted distribution, researchers found. Students who apparently cheated were 6.3% more likely to say they wanted to work in government, the researchers found.
“Overall, we find that dishonest individuals — as measured by the dice task — prefer to enter government service,” wrote Hanna and coauthor Shing-yi Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Anthony Watts takes it a bit further and wonders if this study might explain the man-made climate change scandal called ClimateGate. ClimateGate involved thousands of emails over many years between climate researchers, all of whom had connections to government, who conspired to hide the decline, to fudge the models, to hide their research from FOIA requests:
On 17 November 2009 a large number of emails, together with other documents and pieces of code, from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were posted on a Russian web server, and announced anonymously at the Air Vent blog, Climate Audit, Real Climate, The Blackboard, and WUWT with the comment:
We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.Of note, was the immediate deletion of the comment at Real Climate, and then a campaign by Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS to convince Lucia at the Blackboard that the release wasn’t to be trusted.
In that release from the “FOIA” leaker, we saw revelations like “Mike’s Nature Trick“. Here is a list of some of the emails and their content.From this Google document page:http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/climategate
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Massaging the presentation of data:
- 942777075.txt the infamous “trick” to “hide the decline” in tree-ring data
- 939154709.txt “They go from 1402 to 1995, although we usually stop the series in 1960″ (also referring to tree-ring data)
- 1225026120.txt “I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down” (referring to recent temperature data).
- 1254108338.txt “So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean” … “It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip”. This relates to the rapid warming before 1940 followed by cooling after 1940, which the ‘scientists’ would like to remove because it does not fit with their theory.
Attempting to get papers with a sceptical view on global warming rejected from journals, and not referred to in the IPCC reports:
- 1089318616.txt “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !”
- 1054756929.txt Ed Cook discusses with Keith Briffa how to get a paper rejected even though the mathematics is correct
- 1054748574.txt where Briffa says “I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review – Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting”
- 1080742144.txt where Jones “went to town” rejecting two papers that had criticised his work.
Refusing to provide data and supporting information when requested, and deleting emails (all quotes from Phil Jones):
- 1107454306.txt “The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone”.
- 1109021312.txt “I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !”
- 1182255717.txt “Think I’ve managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.”
- 1211924186.txt Tim Osborn informs Caspar Amman that an FOI request has been received from David Holland about papers included in the IPCC report (May 27 2008) ….
- 1212009215.txt Jones suggests what “Keith could say” and “Keith should say” (May 28 2008) …
Many more examples at Watts site.
What I find kind of amusing however is that the students in the study inflated the numbers…..just as the climate researchers did.
How ironic.
See author page