Irony comes in many forms. Fire stations burn down. Marriage counselors file for divorce. Doctors are obese.
Anything is possible when it comes to irony, and yet, it always seems to catch us off guard.
In the last few days, the irony meter has been going off the charts in the field of Psychology.
Francesca Gino, a professor at the Harvard Business School, has been placed on administrative leave under suspicion of faking data in a study about dishonesty published in 2012.
If that was not enough irony for a story, Gino is also the author of “Rebel Talent - Why It Pays To Break Rules At Work and In Life”
If this was a movie, I would brush it off as poor writing and lazy storytelling. This is real life. Terrifyingly so.
Here is the story of how the lie was uncovered and what it means for the field of Psychology.
Strike One
In 2012, a paper was published with three different studies claiming to prove that dishonesty could be reduced by making people sign a “declaration of honesty” before the information was sought instead of after it.
Think of it like this, when we file for taxes, we first fill in all our information and the income we had in a financial year BEFORE we sign a declaration saying that all the information is accurate and true to the best of our knowledge.
Ariely (the main author) and his colleagues claimed that seeking relevant information AFTER people have signed a declaration leads to more honest responses and smaller degrees of dishonesty.
Out of these three, the third one had been proven to contain fraudulent data back in 2021. It was not clear who faked the data. Ariely, the main author had no role in data collection, and neither did any of his co-authors: Shu, Mazar, Gino, and Bazerman.
While it is not known who faked the data, the study has since been retracted. Remember, this was only the third of three studies on dishonesty from a single paper.
Strike Two
On June 17, Data Colada, a group of researchers published another article called “Data Falsificada (Part 1)” - a four-part investigation into the data from study 1 in the paper mentioned above. They claim the data in the first study was faked as well.
Two different people independently faked data for two different studies in a paper about dishonesty.
Data Colada Blog
I will be honest, I was not able to understand how they managed to find it out, but the evidence they have seems pretty solid. I am glad fields like data forensics exist. I may not understand them but they obviously know what they are doing.
Take this row for example.
You can see that the data which exists on row 70 in the Excel file originally belonged between rows 3 and 4. This shift can only occur if the data has been manipulated by hand to achieve desired results. You can read how they found this out (Sherlock style) on the original blog.
Since this data was shared with Harvard Business School, Gino, responsible for collecting data in study 1 has been placed on leave. The authors of the blog believe other papers authored by Gino have fake data as well.
And We’re Out
What does this finding mean for the field of Psychology? Nothing good I am afraid. Psychology is considered a low-trust science as it is. We have a replication crisis that does not seem to have abated in 12 years and it seems like there is a lot of fake data floating around as well.
Public trust in science is at an all-time low. Fraud like this only gives further fuel to science deniers and damages public perception about the authenticity of scientific findings.
There is no obvious solution to this problem either. These two instances of fraud were caught only because the collected data was made open access for others to scrutinize. Most requests for data scrutiny are met with stonewalling and flat-out denials.
As Uri, Joe, and Leif, the creators of Data Colada succinctly put it, “We experience the consequences of fraud collectively as researchers, the efforts to stamp out fraud should be collective as well.”
Unfortunately, right now, they are not and Psychology is still paying for it.
I Launched My Ebook!
It’s funny that a case of research fraud was exposed a day after I launched my ebook on Research and stats. That’s how life is at times I guess.
Either way, this week, I launched my new ebook, “Research for Rookies” through a webinar.
I know how tough research and statistics can seem for students in their bachelor’s and master’s, especially in India. This is an attempt to help you understand the basic concepts of research in easy, fun, and relatable ways.
You can buy the ebook through this link.
Sales from the book ensure that this newsletter remains free for all. You can support my work by getting yourself a copy today!
Happy Reading!
Until next time,
Arjun