I don't think "moral reassurance" has anything to do with it, at least in the hard sciences. The universe will smack you hard with reality if you're grifting, there are limits to lying in this space (at least). For example, you can't lie about creating full self-driving because it simply won't work in all the conditions/scenarios under which we expect human-like performance.

> The universe will smack you hard with reality if you're grifting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine

Choice quotes:

> a medical researcher at the University of Texas, found that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies

> A survey of cancer researchers found that half of them had been unable to reproduce a published result

> A 2016 survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment results (including 87% of chemists, 77% of biologists, 69% of physicists and engineers, 67% of medical researchers, 64% of earth and environmental scientists, and 62% of all others

How many of those papers were retracted, you think?

Was Nature able to reproduce these results? On another set of ~1,500 papers after 2016?

Aren't you making my point though by pointing out the replication crisis? I wasn't saying that academics grift less than others.

The vast majority of "failed replication" has nothing to do with fraud or false findings, and everything to do with "You have to write what you did to get this result that other people can follow, but you aren't really incentivized to be comprehensive and clear and note down every possible contributor so nobody can recreate the reaction you had in your paper because you didn't write down that you did it in an especially cold lab"