Behavioral insights for improving research integrity

Authors

Uusberg, Andero, de Vos, Maura, Andres, Siim, Voodla, Alan, Fanelli, Daniele & Iordanou, Kalypso

Description

This study frames research integrity as a behavior-change challenge and proposes the CICO model—shaping competencies, incentives, communities, and opportunities as a way to understand and improve researchers’ choices. Each category represents a different cause of problematic behavior and a different avenue for intervention: building skills and habits, adjusting rewards and motivations, shifting community norms, and redesigning environments and processes to make ethical actions easier. The framework integrates existing literature on the causes of questionable practices and offers a structure for developing multifaceted interventions that together can generate meaningful improvement.

The document also reports an online experiment testing an incentive-based approach. Increasing the salience of either personal values or adverse consequences nudged participants toward preferring higher-integrity choices, though this effect appeared only in the first vignette where participants actively reflected on how those factors applied. The findings suggest that integrity can be strengthened by prompting researchers to consider how their options align with their values and the consequences they seek to avoid.