Three studies co-authored by Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School, are on their way to being retracted following allegations that they contain fraudulent data.
A trio of academics have been writing a series of posts on their blog, Data Colada, about what they characterize as evidence of fraud in four of the renowned behavioral scientist’s papers. Their findings were sent to Harvard in the fall of 2021, the bloggers wrote, and the university was seeking to have them retracted.
Their allegations, along with their suggestion that “many more Gino-authored papers” could “contain fake data,” have set off a panic among Gino’s dozens of collaborators. Now that Gino is on administrative leave, as The Chronicle reported this month, many researchers are looking with suspicion at the scholar, who rose to prominence for her eye-catching research into — among other things — dishonesty…..
The fourth paper that the Data Colada bloggers examined — and the first that they wrote about — was published in 2012. It found that signing an honesty pledge at the top of a form, rather than at the bottom, decreased cheating. A number of rows in the dataset appeared to have been manually tampered with, the data detectives wrote, in a way that bolstered the result that signing at the top decreased cheating.
But it can’t get retracted — because it already has been. That happened in the fall of 2021, after Data Colada found separate evidence of fraud in the third experiment in the paper. That data had been procured from an insurance company by only one co-author, Dan Ariely of Duke, who has denied being the one who fabricated it.
As Professor Brian Skyrms, who flagged this for me, quipped: "It seems that data manipulation pays off very well if you don’t get caught."
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