My first thought on seeing the title was, "There must be a behavioral basis to this."

I'm interested in how much of this is ethics, a push to get more drastic results, or what is accepted by journals. The last case can be very true too - if there are too many journal submissions, it may be puffery on the referees instead of the publishers.

One way to test this is to see if there is a difference in the results from tenured versus untenured professors, or even in individuals post-tenure. If puffery shrinks post-tenure, then it really is the publish or perish mindset.