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Many forces at play: Ethical dilemmas in academic research

In the focal article, Lefkowitz (2021) defined “ethical dilemma” as a situation in which an agent is faced with two or more valid choices. Although each choice can be considered “ethical,” selecting one generally means the remaining choices cannot be enacted, resulting in at least one moral failure. In other words, as opposed to incivility or corruption where there is general agreement over morally right and wrong actions, ethical dilemmas involve conflicts between two or more equally valid moral norms and ethical perspectives. Lefkowitz’s analysis of choice predicaments that are experienced by members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) offered initial support for a proposed taxonomy of ethical dilemmas in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology research and practice. However, the focal article did not explain why these ethical dilemmas might have arisen in the first place. Given the high amount of coercive behavior (37.3%) and its prevalence across academic contexts (12.9% in academic research, 9.4% in academic supervising and mentoring, and 7.6% in academic teaching and administration), we believe that it is prudent to explore the reasons that these ethical dilemmas have been reported in academia. Indeed, one might expect that academia would feature fewer ethical dilemmas given the structured nature of research and publications, tenure and promotion, and institutional review board policies. However, the focal article’s findings reinforce the growing public awareness of ethical “gray areas” in academia (e.g., Conn, 2016; Ferguson, 2015), lending further support to the need to explore why ethical dilemmas arise. To better understand why ethical dilemma types and rates differ across contexts, we encourage future researchers to augment Lefkowitz’s (2021) “context-free” classification system and treat the proposed structural forms as “parent nodes” in a hierarchical taxonomy (cf., Bosco et al., 2017; National Information Standards Organization, 2005). Put differently, we encourage researchers to branch from major classifications of ethical dilemmas to finer abstractions, which will aid the development of “context-free” and “context-specific” paradigmatic structural forms for classifying ethical dilemmas. We contend that the use of parent nodes may alleviate concerns that are brought about by varied terminology across contexts, thus facilitating interdisciplinary research. In contrast, the addition of children nodes may help to improve our understanding of the manifest nature of ethical challenges within disciplines. Furthermore, visualizing the nomological network of ethical dilemmas in this way will help researchers and practitioners to understand the breadth and depth of choice predicaments across contexts, which is aligned with the concept of customercentric science (Aguinis et al., 2010). To illustrate our proposal, we draw on the literature on questionable research practices (QRPs) to augment Lefkowitz’s (2021) taxonomy in the academic context of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology (see Figure 1), a setting in which ethical dilemmas are very common according