More Mischief from Academics By James Reed

Francesca Gino, a behavioural scientist at Harvard Business School, published research on the topic of academic honesty. That is a hot topic given the amount of fraud in academia. And, blow me over, there are now allegations that she fabricated data. If true, that is pretty dishonest, and mighty ironic. Why should we be interested beyond out usual critique of the corrupt universities? I think it raises the issue of why we should trust any of the stuff pumped out by these so-called researchers, from climate change buff to medical research? I think it all needs to be taken with a bag of salt, which is why the ordinary people need to think about science. I am trying with what brain I have left, as we are deep into a technocracy now.

https://www.science.org/content/article/harvard-behavioral-scientist-aces-research-fraud-allegations

“Data sleuths say they have found evidence of possible research fraud in several papers by Francesca Gino, a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. The publications under scrutiny include a 2012 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper on dishonesty that has already been retracted for apparent data fabrication by a different researcher.

“That’s right: Two different people independently faked data for two different studies in a paper about dishonesty,” write behavioral scientists Uri Simonsohn, Joseph Simmons, and Leif Nelson on their blog, Data Colada, where they published the new evidence supporting their allegations.

Anonymous researchers first found signs of fabricated data in the influential PNAS paper in 2021. The authors of the work had independently conducted different studies on the same question: whether signing an honesty declaration at the top of a form rather than the bottom made people behave more honestly.

That report called into question the work of superstar behavioral scientist Dan Ariely, and the paper was subsequently retracted. Now, Simonsohn, Simmons, and Nelson report finding oddities in the data files for another of the experiments, which they say suggests someone had manipulated the data to influence the outcome of the analysis.

Gino, who offers corporate keynote speeches and has authored two popular books, contributed the data for the experiment in question, according to the Data Colada bloggers. The Chronicle of Higher Education, which broke the news of the latest twist the day before the blog post, notes that Gino had told a co-author that a lab manager had collected the data.

Other papers by Gino may also contain manipulated data, according to the trio of bloggers. They have posted details of their findings for two papers and say they plan to publish analyses of two more in the coming days.

The data sleuths say they have reported their concerns to Harvard. Gino is on administrative leave, according to a note on her faculty page. She did not respond to a request for comment.”