Cultivating Honest and Courageous Researchers: Teaching Statistics Through a Christian Virtue Lens

In recent years, the social sciences have faced a “replication crisis,” raising questions about how we conduct, report, and interpret research findings. A large-scale replication project in 2015 tried to recreate nearly 100 studies from recent publications and found only about 40% of attempts successfully replicated. This finding sent shock waves through the psychology community. When done well, the results of scientific studies should be replicable. It was time for psychological scientists (and scientists in other disciplines who have similarly begun to identify replication failures) to reckon with questions about scientific rigor and human integrity.

One proposed solution to this replication crisis was an open science practice known as preregistration, which is where hypotheses and analysis plans are submitted to an unchangeable online repository before collecting or analyzing any data. Pre-registration serves as a check on integrity and the temptation to create hypotheses that support your data (rather than see if your data support your hypotheses). It can also minimize poor research practices like “p-hacking” (adding participants little by little until you see a significant result) or exhausting countless analysis approaches to find an outcome that best supports your hypothesis.

In addition to preregistration being a good scientific practice, it also offers an opportunity for Christian researchers to lean into their values and practice being persons of character. As educators, we can help our students do the same. Intentionally teaching preregistration in a statistics or research methods classroom with virtue ethics in mind can be an exercise in moral formation. By inviting students to practice the virtues of honesty, wisdom, and courage as they learn about why pre-registration matters and file their own pre-registration reports, we can help them become teachers and researchers who pursue their work ethically. For the past year, I have been practicing this process with my own students.

I teach at a Christian university where my course load is mainly statistics courses in the social sciences, and I love it. I’ve spent this past year learning to be more intentional about integrating Christian character formation in my classes with encouragement from Dr. Brittany Tausen, who is leading the Classrooms that Cultivate Character project through Wake Forest University’s Educating Character Initiative.

I’ll admit, at first, I was perplexed about how to teach for character in a statistics classroom. While I’m still refining this through trial and error, books like “How to Lie with Statistics” have continued to fuel my interest in this work. Given how easy it can be to manipulate data when reporting results, I knew I wanted to make sure we practiced “How to Be Honest with Statistics” in my classroom.

One way I do this is through scaffolded engagement with open science practices, like pre-registration, as an exercise in character formation. In my advanced statistics course, I provide students with an openly available dataset and let them each choose a few unique variables that they are interested in for their final project. This project involves analyzing the variables they chose in the data using the skills they learned throughout the class. I make sure to emphasize that their grades will not be impacted by whether they find statistically significant results (something that, unfortunately, cannot be said for one’s publication record in the field).

This year, one student developed a reasonable hypothesis connecting peer support to psychological well-being in emerging adulthood, while controlling for effects of family income level. Using an open-source dataset, she carefully selected variables to correspond with her hypothesis and submitted a preregistration with her analysis plan before viewing the data. Her hypothesis was thoughtful and well-founded, grounded in both theory and personal interest.

After running the preregistered analyses, the results showed no statistically significant findings. The student was understandably disappointed (a familiar feeling to any researcher who has failed to find a significant effect in their data). Yet the preregistration provided a kind of moral framework, or what Michael Lamm, Ed Brooks and Johnathan Brant’s “Seven Strategies for Virtue Cultivation” might classify as a moral reminder.¹ Having already committed to a hypothesis and analysis plan, the student was freed from the pressure to revise her hypothesis, run a few alternative analyses, or even hide the results (non-significant findings often go unpublished).

During a class discussion, my student shared their experience with humility and clarity. What might have felt like a “failed” project became an example of responsible and ethical research. The student’s openness helped us all recognize that research integrity isn’t about getting the “right” (read: significant) result—it’s about reporting the true one.

When teaching statistics, I have found it helpful to emphasize that preregistration can be one way we model a Christian posture for reporting our scientific findings. In my courses, I frame preregistration using a virtue framework. We explore how ethical research isn’t just about following rules or checking boxes to show we are doing the “right thing”. It’s about becoming the kind of person who consistently seeks truth and practices integrity. Some key values that come up during these discussions include:

• Honesty: Preregistration invites us to state our hypotheses and plans up front, before data could sway them. This commitment reduces motivation to come up with hypotheses after the results are already known and makes it easier to report findings with confidence.
• Courage: Facing the possibility of being wrong, and doing so publicly, is daunting at any level, from student to seasoned professor. Preregistration asks us to take that risk, exposing our ideas before we know if data supports them or not. When disappointing results do happen, talking about the discrepancies in our pre-registered ideas and our data is a way we can further exercise moral courage in a deeply formative way.
• Wisdom: Preregistration forces early and deliberate decision-making: which variables to use, how to define them, what models to run. It builds habits of forethought and intellectual discipline as we do our research with integrity.

Preregistration can be promoted as a guardrail against questionable research practices: retrospective hypothesis-shifting, selective reporting, or flexible stopping rules that inflate false positives. In theory, it offers transparency and accountability for methodology by making it clear what a study intended, not just what it found. Yet critics rightly observe that preregistration alone can’t solve all the problems associated with the replication crisis. It can seem rigid or superficial if researchers preregister but still manipulate data in subtle ways, or if they treat preregistration as a box to check rather than a moral commitment.

Preregistration can only promote credibility when paired with transparency about data, analysis, theorizing, and a larger “why.” For open science practices to be adopted independently, it is critical for students (and researchers) to have a deep understanding about how such practices fit into their larger transcendent narratives and personal moral identities. For Christian scholars, these connections can help us more deeply appreciate the importance of open science practices, not just for replicable science, but for being faithful researchers in pursuit of truth about God’s good creation.

Christian higher education is uniquely positioned to bridge scientific skill-building with becoming people of integrity and character. When students are taught how and why to preregister, they learn more than technical accuracy; they practice virtues central to their character formation. Honesty reflects our belief that truth matters, even when it costs us. Courage grows from the conviction that our worth isn’t tied to performance, but to faithfulness. By teaching statistical methods as character formation, we offer students a glimpse of how we can show up fully as both researchers and Christians as we seek to understand patterns in this world. In a culture that promotes a “publish or perish” mindset that is often focused on flashy results, it matters that our students learn to walk securely with integrity throughout the process (Proverbs 10:9). Such moral reminders are likely helpful for us as both Christians and scholars, as well.

Although my student’s preregistered project did not yield a “significant” result, the experience had a lasting impact on me and the ways I think about how and why I teach open science practices. Analyzing data can be an opportunity for worship, practiced in truth, humility, and faith. Teaching preregistration in statistics and research methods courses through the lens of virtue can be one part of forming scholars who are both statistically rigorous and spiritually grounded.

Note: This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from Wake Forest University and the Lilly Endowment Inc. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Wake Forest University or the Lilly Endowment Inc. We have no known conflict of interest to disclose.

1. Michael Lamb, Jonathan Brant, and Edward Brooks, “Seven Strategies for Cultivating Virtue in the University,” in Cultivating Virtue in the University, eds. Jonathan Brant, Edward W. R. L. Brooks, and Michael Lamb (Oxford University Press, 2022), 134-35.