Pot, kettle: Nonliteral titles aren’t (natural) science

Is the pot calling the kettle black?

The Pot Calling the Kettle Black? A Comparison of Measures of Current Tobacco Use.

Researchers often use the discrepancy between self-reported and biochemically assessed active smoking status to argue that self-reported smoking status is not reliable, ignoring the limitations of biochemically assessed measures and treating it as the gold standard in their comparisons. Here, we employ econometric techniques to compare the accuracy of self-reported and biochemically assessed cu...

The Pot Blaming the Kettle: Bureaucratic Integration and Anticorruption in Chinese Provinces

How to combat corruption while maintaining absolute power is a central dilemma facing rulers of authoritarian countries. External monitoring institutions such as independent judiciary and enforcement agencies are incompatible with the structure of authoritarian regimes, whose anti-corruption strategies are often limited to methods of oversight and control within bureaucratic organizations. This...

On moralizing and hidden agendas: the pot and the kettle in political bioethics.

Henry et al. (2007) present a cogent analysis of the use of propranolol in preventing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They express a wide range of unanswered questions regarding this use of propranolol and criticize the report of the President’s Council on Bioethics (2003) on pharmacologic memory suppression on grounds of its obviously conservative agenda. The authors’ greatest concern i...

The pot calling the kettle black: distancing response to ethical dissonance.

Six studies demonstrate the "pot calling the kettle black" phenomenon whereby people are guilty of the very fault they identify in others. Recalling an undeniable ethical failure, people experience ethical dissonance between their moral values and their behavioral misconduct. Our findings indicate that to reduce ethical dissonance, individuals use a double-distancing mechanism. Using an overcom...