Recently, I read Lying for Money, which introduced me to the concept of a criminogenic environment. This refers to a situation that encourages or fosters illegal activities in a predictable manner so that the individuals who create this situation can be culpable even if they do not actually “pull the trigger.”
In academic science, I have often observed a similar phenomenon what I've coined as “fraudogenic environments.” These environments, knowingly or unknowingly created by Principal Investigators (PIs), allow the PI to retain plausible deniability while subtly fostering fraudulent practices. For the PI, it’s a “heads, I win; tails, you lose” situation: if the fraud is successful, they benefit; if it is discovered, they blame the trainee and call themselves a victim too.
In my mind, the fradogenicity of the environment is a combination of (1) high-rewards for particular positive results (or, equivalently, strong punishment for negative results) and (2) a lack of control against the possibility of fraud.
In research labs, this concept manifests on a spectrum, ranging from benign negligence to a more sinister cultivation of a coercive environment. At one end, it can be as passive as the PI not probing too critically into exceptionally good results. The opposite end of the spectrum is where the PI directly or indirectly pressures researchers into delivering positive results, with veiled threats of repercussions1.
When it comes to the recently-ousted President of Stanford University, nobody is claiming that he was personally faking data, but we can ask whether he inadvertently contributed to a culture of negligence or facilitated a fraudogenic environment? Like with other domains of life distinguishing between honest mistakes and negligence is a fair question even without claiming intentionality (e.g., when a patient has died at an operating table, it is fair to ask if the surgeon and their team were following best-practices).
Naturally, even the most scrupulous PI can be misled by a cunningly fraudulent student. However, it's fair to question PIs who have had fraud within their labs. We can ask what the measures they consistently implement to safeguard their work and the scientific community at large.
Fortunately, many of the same practices that protect us against fraud are good scientific practices in general: trying to internally reproduce results and making it easier for others to reproduce externally will make the whole field more trustworthy. Fostering a culture where people discuss what went wrong in their research will make the positive results you get even more robust
Institutionally, we can also do better. I have gotten many small-scale checks/audits about money spent. I think this happened in every single institution that I worked at. Some of these were absurd in their dedication to paperwork over productivity, but some were very reasonable (after all, without any checks, fraud is inevitable). However, I have never gotten any checks on whether I was faking data. Funding agencies worry that we might be spending 10s of euros without following all the rules, but not that we defrauded them of millions by faking data. If a student wants to be a whistleblower with respect some fraud, is there someone at the institution with the authority and the will to protect them?
Often this can sound like Mafia speak:" nice fellowship, you have there, it would be a shame to lose it because you don’t have positive results.