Mora­lity and com­pe­ti­tion in sci­ence

With a total of 45 individual study designs, researchers investigated the question of the influence of competition on moral behaviour. How does competition influence moral behaviour? Studies have so far found evidence for both a negative and a positive influence of competition on moral behaviour. Researchers from Innsbruck, Vienna, Stockholm and Amsterdam are using this unanswered question in a meta-study to investigate the extent to which different study designs can be responsible for variability in scientific results. The study was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Do markets, as already argued by Adam Smith, have a civilising effect and thus make market participants more moral? Or are thinkers like Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen closer to the truth and is moral behaviour subordinated to profit interests in market economies? The question of the influence of competition on morality can be traced back to the beginning of modern social science research, but a clear answer is still lacking: there are both empirical studies that find a positive effect of competition on moral behaviour and those that show the opposite. Researchers led by Felix Holzmeister, Michael Kirchler and Jürgen Huber from the University of Innsbruck, together with colleagues from Vienna, Stockholm and Amsterdam, used this open question as the starting point for a meta-study recently published in PNAS: "We wanted to use this question to investigate how great the variability of experimental research results can be when the same question is addressed with different study designs," explains Felix Holzmeister from the Department of Economics at the University of Innsbruck, co-author of the study.  45 study designs.