The Soul of Science

On Integrity in an Age of Pragmatic Academia

By Ranran Li · 2025

As academia celebrates excellence via metrics, curiosity dims into deliverables, authorship inflates, and even Open Science and moral discourse risk becoming performative. In a system that rewards appearances, virtue turns strategic, and integrity becomes a fragile luxury.

Curiosity for its own sake? Publish or perish!

Richard Feynman once quipped that “Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.” It is a line that captures a spirit many of us once believed academia embodied: a space where curiosity for its own sake—where the joy of understanding the world—was justification in itself.

That spirit feels increasingly distant nowadays. Today, scientific work is celebrated less for the truths it uncovers and more for the deliverables it produces: the papers, indicators, citations, grants, the “outputs” that populate CVs. Curiosity—the simple, unguarded desire to know—has been eclipsed by a more utilitarian logic. If Feynman saw science as an intrinsic act of wonder, today’s academic culture frames it instead as a performance of productivity.

This shift is understandable. In a world governed by “publish or perish,” survival depends on meeting quantifiable expectations. Early- and mid-career researchers see quickly that although curiosity inspires a project, it is productivity that secures a contract; that although discovery may be noble, it is deliverability that is rewarded. “Curiosity for its own sake” is increasingly replaced by a more strategic question: Will it count?

Yet something essential is lost when curiosity becomes subordinated to metrics. Integrity is harder to uphold when research is less shaped by curiosity and more by strategic calculations. We begin to optimize for speed over depth, story over accuracy, visibility over substance. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the values that defined scholarship—honesty, humanism, epistemic humility—start to feel like luxuries rather than guides.

Academic inflation

As the “publish or perish” culture shapes individual behavior, academic inflation comes as the collective result (Berg & Seeber, 2016). Academia has entered an era marked not only by the exponential growth of published outputs but also by a shift in how work is produced. The mass co-authorship model, once an occasional feature of large consortia, is increasingly becoming the norm.

But when authorship begins to function more as a currency than a genuine contribution, it signals a deeper transformation. In such an environment, “scientific collectivism” emerges as a necessity for survival rather than a natural outcome of intellectual collaboration. Everyone is nudged to produce more—more papers, more outputs, more lines on a CV. For early-career researchers, the pressure is acute: without a long publication list, opportunities vanish. Those who refuse to play this metrics-based game, or who insist on depth over volume, quickly find themselves weeded out.

Academic inflation thus creates a paradox: As outputs multiply, their symbolic value diminishes, pushing researchers to chase even greater volume just to keep pace (Smaldino & McElreath, 2016).

The performative turn of Open Science

Open Science began as a movement to safeguard the integrity of scientific work—a commitment to transparency, reproducibility, and the simple principle that science should be not only newsworthy but trustworthy. I still remember how touched I was the early days with a sense of sincerity and idealism—reading Chris Chambers’ The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology (2017), attending Eric-Jan Wagenmakers’ seminars on Good Research Practices, even writing blogs to promote Open Science in the Chinese research community. It felt like a collective awakening: a return to honesty, clarity, and humility.

But over time, something shifted. What started as a commitment to science and morality gradually became a strategically advantageous choice. Good research practices transformed from a means of improving research into a signal—a way to demonstrate credibility, virtue, and alignment with evolving norms. Preregistrations, data sharing, and transparent workflows are unquestionably valuable, yet they increasingly function as markers of compliance and good research practices in a competitive landscape. Open Science performativity has emerged as a new academic currency.

This evolution does not diminish the importance of Open Science. Rather, it reveals how even reform movements can be absorbed by the very incentive structures they aim to challenge. When scientific practices become strategic, the line between genuine integrity and performative virtue grows harder to discern.

Moral Irony

If Open Science shows how even reform movements can become strategic, the wider ecosystem of academia reveals a sharper paradox: the reward system unintentionally favors the very behaviors that scholarship often warns against. In a landscape where success is tied to visibility, competition, and symbolic virtue, self-promotion becomes adaptive, and self-interest—rather than integrity—often pays.

These dynamics breed familiar patterns: favoring ingroups (and excluding outgroups) in information sharing, collaborations and reviewing, strategic alliances that privilege connections over ideas, and even spiteful competition that quietly pushes those who deviate from expectations. Research shows that competition can erode morality and prosociality (Huber et al., 2023); academia, for all its rhetoric of objectivity and virtue, is not exempt from these.

What makes this especially ironic is that the very scholars who study morality, ethics, or wellbeing are not insulated from them. Performative moral signaling—framing oneself as transparent, principled, or community-minded—can become a form of academic branding. Careerism hides behind virtue. Moral critique becomes a resource. Even those who study occupational health may preside over environments where PhD students are overworked, under-supported, or subtly exploited.

These contradictions do not imply hypocrisy at the individual level as much as they reveal something structural: a reward system that amplifies moral language while undermining moral practice. In a pragmatic academic culture, even morality itself can be instrumental—less a compass than a costume.

Integrity must become a practice, not a performance

All of this brings us to a simple but uncomfortable question: Can virtue be genuine in a system that rewards only its appearance? In a “publish or perish” culture where success hinges on productivity, visibility, and strategic self-presentation, integrity risks becoming something we signal rather than something we uphold.

Yet science has always relied on a deeper ethic—one that places the pursuit of truth above the pursuit of recognition. Integrity then, is not a label or badge. It is a daily discipline: choosing accuracy over speed, substance over visibility, curiosity over strategic calculation. It means resisting the pressure to optimize for metrics, even when metrics determine survival. It means treating others—students, colleagues, collaborators, reviewers and reviewees—with fairness.

Recovering integrity does not require rejecting productivity, competition, or collaboration. It requires reclaiming the values that make (social) science research worth doing in the first place—curiosity, epistemic humility, humanity. Integrity thus must be anchored not in performance but in practice.

Perhaps that is a quiet antidote to pragmatic academia. Not a new metric, nor a new movement, but a return to something older and more fragile: a commitment to truth that cannot be gamed or quantified. In the end, the moral cost of pragmatic academia is high. But the path back begins with the simplest of scientific virtues—the willingness to care, and to mean what we claim to value.

References

Berg, M., & Seeber, B. K. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy (pp. x, 115). University of Toronto Press.

Smaldino, P. E., & McElreath, R. (2016). The natural selection of bad science. Royal Society Open Science, 3(9), 160384. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160384

Chambers, C. (2017). The seven deadly sins of psychology: A manifesto for reforming the culture of scientific practice. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400884940

Huber, C. et al. (2023). Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs. PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120(23), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2215572120

Disclaimer

All views expressed here are my own and do not reflect the views of my affiliated institutions.