Leading Researcher on Honesty, Now Investigated for …Dishonesty! By James Reed
A leading researcher who published on the topic of honesty, Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School has been accused of dishonesty, of fabricating findings. This story has been covered on many sites, with the main theme being the obvious irony of it all. But, is this really so odd? Articles forthcoming on this blog will discuss the issue of fraud in academia, including medical and health research, which indicates, that some degree of fraud or sharp practice is mainstream in academia, and the system literally runs on it. Publish or perish has led to researchers often having to cook results to get that next grant perhaps from Big Pharma. Refutations and negative critiques do not usually get published, being chopped by typically corrupt editors, who are servants of the same corporates.
“A Harvard Business School behavioral scientist who co-authored widely-cited research on honesty has been accused of fabricating findings, the New York Times reported.
"As I continue to evaluate these allegations and assess my options, I am limited into what I can say publicly," Francesca Gino said in a post on LinkedIn to which she referred TheBlaze when reached for comment Sunday morning.
"I want to assure you that I take them seriously and they will be addressed," Gino also said in the post, adding that there will be "more to come on all of this."
Gino's work, among other topics, explores the effectiveness of simple interventions that could encourage honesty. For example, a widely-cited 2012 paper looked at whether people would be more honest in filling out tax or insurance documents if a question asking them to attest to their honesty were placed at the top of the form instead of the bottom, as explained in the NYT.
Questions about the data underlying the published work of Harvard Business School's Francesca Gino came into question in a piece in the Chronicles of Higher Education earlier this month.
"The irony of this being a story about data fraud in a paper on inducing honesty is not lost on me," Harvard Business School's Max Bazerman, a co-author with Gino on one of the honesty studies in question, told CoHE.
Data Colada, a group blog that examines the integrity of social science research, launched a four-part series called "Data Falsificada" examining what they say is evidence of fraud in four papers authored by Gino. The first, entitled "Clusterfake," was published June 17. The most recent, part 3, was published Friday.
Data Colada analyzed a study Gino co-authored which measured research participants' honesty in a virtual coin flipping task. As in another study of Gino's they examined, Data Colada's authors say they found a "tell-tale sign of fraud" in the dataset that stemmed from how the data were sorted. Data Colada's authors also said they had identified which cells in the dataset had been tampered with and by how much the values had been changed.
Gino's page on Harvard Business School's website indicates she is on administrative leave. Gino was not listed as being on leave as recently as mid-May, according to the NYT.”
Comments