We recently presented evidence of data tampering in four retracted papers co-authored by Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino. She is now suing the three of us (and Harvard University). Gino’s lawsuit (.htm), like many lawsuits, contains a number of Exhibits that present information relevant to the case. For example, the lawsuit contains some Exhibits…
Category: Fake data
[112] Data Falsificada (Part 4): "Forgetting The Words"
This is the last post in a four-part series detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. It is worth reiterating two things. First, to the best of our knowledge, none of Gino’s co-authors carried out or assisted with the data collection for the studies in this…
[111] Data Falsificada (Part 3): "The Cheaters Are Out of Order"
This is the third in a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. It is worth reiterating that to the best of our knowledge, none of Gino’s co-authors carried out or assisted with the data collection for the studies in this series….
[110] Data Falsificada (Part 2): "My Class Year Is Harvard"
This is the second in a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. It is worth reiterating that to the best of our knowledge, none of Gino’s co-authors carried out or assisted with the data collection for the studies in this series….
[109] Data Falsificada (Part 1): "Clusterfake"
This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. In 2021, we and a team of anonymous researchers examined a number of studies co-authored by Gino, because we had concerns that they contained fraudulent data. We discovered evidence…
[98] Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty
This post is co-authored with a team of researchers who have chosen to remain anonymous. They uncovered most of the evidence reported in this post. These researchers are not connected in any way to the papers described herein. *** In 2012, Shu, Mazar, Gino, Ariely, and Bazerman published a three-study paper in PNAS (.htm) reporting…
[77] Number-Bunching: A New Tool for Forensic Data Analysis
In this post I show how one can analyze the frequency with which values get repeated within a dataset – what I call “number-bunching” – to statistically identify whether the data were likely tampered with. Unlike Benford’s law (.htm), and its generalizations, this approach examines the entire number at once, not only the first or…
[74] In Press at Psychological Science: A New 'Nudge' Supported by Implausible Data
Today Psychological Science issued a Corrigendum (.htm) and an expression of concern (htm) for a paper originally posted online in May 2018 (.htm). This post will spell out the data irregularities we uncovered that eventually led to the two postings from the journal today. We are not convinced that those postings are sufficient. It is…
[40] Reducing Fraud in Science
Fraud in science is often attributed to incentives: we reward sexy-results→fraud happens. The solution, the argument goes, is to reward other things. In this post I counter-argue, proposing three alternative solutions. Problems with the Change the Incentives solution. First, even if rewarding sexy-results caused fraud, it does not follow we should stop rewarding sexy-results. We…
[21] Fake-Data Colada: Excessive Linearity
Recently, a psychology paper (.html) was flagged as possibly fraudulent based on statistical analyses (.pdf). The author defended his paper (.html), but the university committee investigating misconduct concluded it had occurred (.pdf). In this post we present new and more intuitive versions of the analyses that flagged the paper as possibly fraudulent. We then rule…