Most of my posts have been focused on ethical lapses — situations where people or organizations have been asleep at the ethical wheel. It is therefore a breath of fresh air for me to find an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning giving attention to a case of ethical awareness and maturity.

China has an unusually high ratio of men to women. This is called the ‘missing woman problem’ and is often attributed to parental preference for sons and resulting selective abortions or even infanticide.

But a recent Harvard economics Ph.D. student, Emily Oster,  made a name for herself by arguing that hepatitis B played a major role as well by affecting female embryos more frequently than male embryos. This path breaking work made her reputation in the field and attracted the attention of famous economists such as Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt.

So far so normal. Here is the newsworthy part:

But Ms. Oster, 28 years old, says newly available data prove that the hepatitis B virus can’t explain China’s skewed sex ratios. What is more, she contributed to the effort showing that the surprising conclusion that helped make her reputation was wrong. Mr. Levitt considers that exceptional. “She did what you would hope good scholars would do but that very few good scholars actually have ever done,” he says.

Economist Scraps Hepatitis Theory On China’s ‘Missing Women’ - WSJ.com

The surprising part here is not that she came forward with this information, but that she was able to set aside her attachment to her prior results enough to truly see the implications of this new data. In other words, she did not fool herself. This is the first (and most difficult) principle of high quality ethical decision making — do not fool yourself.

Richard Feynman, the late Nobel prize winning Caltech professor, called this scientific integrity. He believed that scientists had a responsibility to “bend over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong”. He also lamented how universities do a poor job teaching students how not to fool ourselves. It is not specifically included in any course. Professors hope that students somehow catch on by osmosis.

Ethics is like this in many ways. It is rarely taught systematically. We all just hope that others catch on by osmosis. Two thumbs up to Emily Oster and the WSJ for helping us all with the osmosis process.

Tags: academichonesty, scientific integrity, tell the whole truth, missing woman, ethics