Skip to content

New article: “Objectivity, honesty, and integrity: How American scientists talked about their virtues, 1945–2000”

What kind of people make good scientists? What personal qualities do scholars say their peers should exhibit? And how do they express these expectations? A new, co-authored article from the “Scholarly Vices” team, accepted for publication in the journal History of Science, explores these issues by mapping the kinds of virtues discussed by American scientists between 1945 and 2000. Our wide-ranging comparative analysis maps scientific virtue talk across three distinct disciplines – physics, psychology, and history – and across sources that typify those disciplines’ scientific ethos – introductory textbooks, book reviews, and codes of ethics.