I doubt most people understand the intensity of the incentive to mess with the data. In college I was a lab assistant for a professor who taught courses on rese

I doubt most people understand the intensity of the incentive to mess with the data. In college I was a lab assistant for a professor who taught courses on research integrity and how to evaluate the quality of scientific papers. After thousands of hours of work on a study with routine 20 hour days collecting data, he wasn't getting what he needed to publish. At the tail end of one of those days I caught him with the equivalent of his thumb on the scale. He gave an excuse that he would have failed as an answer on one of his own tests. I argued a bit but then shut up. I kept shut up while that data was not excluded from the analysis that was eventually published. It wasn't enough to change the result, but still bothered me. So yeah, trust maybe but verify definitely. The rewards for faking it are just too great for an honor system to be reliable.