{"text":[[{"start":5.36,"text":"It has been weeks since the prize announcement, and plaudits are long overdue: hearty congratulations to Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton and Dacher Keltner, who discovered that upper-class people are more likely to steal candy from children. They are worthy winners of the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize in economics."}],[{"start":26.14,"text":"I have praised the Ig Nobel Prizes before: they are the irreverent alternative to the Nobel Prizes, this year awarded for achievements such as research into splash-free urinals, burying and later disinterring 1,000 pairs of underpants to assess soil health in various countries, and discovering that babies smell lovely to their parents but teenagers do not. They refresh parts of the scientific discourse that the Nobel Prize does not reach. In the case of the economics prize, the Nobel memorial is all very well, but for a shortcut to understanding what makes economists tick, it’s the Ig Nobel Prize every time."}],[{"start":60.28,"text":"Cheating is a particularly rich seam for economists, and for the Ig Nobel. In 2015, the prize was awarded to the Bangkok Metropolitan Police “for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes”. It is good to see the boys in blue being recognised for advancing the cause of human knowledge."}],[{"start":78.96,"text":"It is just a shame that the Ig Nobel committee cannot reward every worthy recipient. Steven Levitt, co-author of the bestselling Freakonomics (2005), won the prestigious John Bates Clark medal in 2003. He must be sorely disappointed never to have followed up that win with an Ig Nobel."}],[{"start":96.12,"text":"One Ig Nobel-worthy contribution from Levitt was a journalistic piece he and his Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner published in The New York Times Magazine in 2004: “What the Bagel Man Saw”. The Bagel Man in question was Paul Feldman, who ran a successful business delivering thousands of bagels to more than 100 offices in the Washington DC area, collecting money through an honesty box."}],[{"start":118.88,"text":"Feldman, an economist, carefully tracked the repayment rate. He concluded that people were more likely to pay for their bagels in small offices, in offices where the boss was well liked, during recessions and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks."}],[{"start":132.44,"text":"Offices where people needed a security clearance to work were no more honest than anywhere else, which surprised him. Bagels delivered to the executive floor were more likely to be stolen, which did not."}],[{"start":144.56,"text":"Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel are another duo unjustly overlooked by the Ig Nobel committee for their work on cheating. Fisman and Miguel have studied corruption through an unusual lens: the accumulation of unpaid parking tickets by UN officials in Manhattan. The work is ingenious. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, UN officials with diplomatic plates could park where they wanted without fear of financial consequence. Tickets would be issued; paying them was a matter of individual conscience rather than fear of any penalty. What is more, every official, from anywhere in the world, faced the same setting — the mean streets of Manhattan — and the same incentives. Who would succumb to temptation?"}],[{"start":186.12,"text":"Fisman and Miguel found that dishonest behaviour clearly had a cultural component. The number of unpaid parking violations each consulate piled up was strongly correlated with general perceptions of corruption in the home country. Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan and Bulgaria led the way."}],[{"start":203.04,"text":"The consulates of Denmark, Norway and Sweden did not pick up a single unpaid parking ticket between them over the six years studied. By way of contrast, one Kuwaiti diplomat racked up the equivalent of two unpaid parking fines every working day for a year."}],[{"start":217.96,"text":"Fisman and Miguel also noted that in 2002, the incentives sharply changed: New York, with the backing of the US state department, revoked nearly 200 diplomatic plates, and with further action threatened, parking violations dropped by 95 per cent almost overnight. The lesson is that while culture matters, the rules matter too."}],[{"start":238.24,"text":"Speaking of cheating, I am aghast at the lack of an Ig Nobel for a 2012 research paper, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end”. This paper, written by multiple co-authors, presented the results of several studies purporting to find that people are more honest in filling out a form when they sign a promise at the top of the form rather than a declaration at the bottom."}],[{"start":262.74,"text":"It was a famous finding at the time, and is infamous now. The data sleuths Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson and Joe Simmons (collectively “Data Colada”) argued that two of the studies supporting that conclusion contained data that had been manipulated in favour of the scientific hypothesis. The paper has since been retracted."}],[{"start":283.36,"text":"As the Data Colada team put it, “Two different people independently faked data for two different studies in a paper about dishonesty.” That is a special kind of achievement, and exactly the kind of achievement best celebrated by an Ig Nobel Prize. There is some kind of precedent, after all: the 1995 Ig Nobel for economics was shared by a cast of characters including Nick Leeson and his superiors at Barings Bank."}],[{"start":308.96,"text":"But who should receive the prize? That is a ticklish question. One of the studies was supervised by Dan Ariely (author of, among other works, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty (2012)) and another by Francesca Gino (author of Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life (2018)). Data Colada have presented evidence of suspected data falsification in another study supervised by Ariely and in several by Gino. Ariely denies manipulating data and suggests that it was faulty when supplied to him by a third party; Gino says that she has been falsely accused of research malpractice and there is an innocent explanation for the apparent anomalies."}],[{"start":349.48,"text":"Different people will reach their own conclusions about who, if anyone, might have faked the data in all those academic studies, but the Ig Nobel is a prize with a sense of humour and nobody can deny there is a certain dark comedy to the situation."}],[{"start":363.34,"text":"The philosophy of the Ig Nobel Prize is that it should make you laugh — and then make you think. Researchers have certainly been thinking, reflecting on the ease with which sloppy practice and worse have too often passed unnoticed in academia. Perhaps it is time to rely less on the honesty box system, and to revoke those diplomatic number plates."}],[{"start":382.48,"text":"But has the community of researchers been laughing? Perhaps. Sometimes you either have to laugh, or to cry."}],[{"start":390.52,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":397.44,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1793966128_4273.mp3"}