There is so much to unpack in this story written by Gideon Lewis-Kraus from The New Yorker. The gist of it is that renowned behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of the book Predictably Irrational, and a very prominent Harvard Business School professor, Francesca Gino, who both worked on dishonesty, have, in a sudden twist of irony, been accused of fabricating their data.
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
Ariely became famous for his work on “The Honesty Pledge” wherein he added a line on an insurance company’s automobile-policy review form that prompted participants to sign an honesty declaration, with half the forms placing the pledge at the beginning, and the other half at the end. His thesis was that those with the honesty pledge at the beginning of the form were less likely to lie in the forms than those with the honesty pledge at the end. On the published paper, Ariely found that those who signed the honesty pledge at the beginning were less likely to cheat.
Francesca Gino became prominent in the late 2000s when she saw several papers she wrote being published in journals in a year. She also worked on the topic of dishonesty and frequently collaborated with Ariely. With her unprecedented surge in productivity, Gino became an HBS professor who had a significant influence in research circles. Despite this, several professors and researchers had expressed their doubts about the data and the results of her research. But most of those were simply brushed off, leaving Gino virtually untouched throughout her more than a decade tenure at HBS.
It wasn’t until Zoe Ziani, a former PhD candidate who was denied a doctorate because of her critique of Gino’s work, contacted the group of Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn, collectively called Data Colada, the title of their blog where they unraveled the dishonest practices of researchers and called out people in their field, to show them Ariely’s car-insurance study and started the whole investigation into Ariely’s work, apart from Gino’s work whom they were already looking into.
Long story short, Gino was placed on administrative leave by Harvard, and although Ariely has continued to forget, misremember, or lie about the data he used or the methods he used to get them for his research, much doubt has been cast on the veracity of the results his studies claimed. For the full details of this story, check it out on The New Yorker.
(Image credit: UX Indonesia/Unsplash)
Source: neatorama