Three studies co-authored by Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School, are on their way to being retracted following allegations that they contain fraudulent data.
A trio of academics have been writing a series of posts on their blog, Data Colada, about what they characterize as evidence of fraud in four of the renowned behavioral scientist’s papers. Their findings were sent to Harvard in the fall of 2021, the bloggers wrote, and the university was seeking to have them retracted.
Their allegations, along with their suggestion that “many more Gino-authored papers” could “contain fake data,” have set off a panic among Gino’s dozens of collaborators. Now that Gino is on administrative leave, as The Chronicle reported this month, many researchers are looking with suspicion at the scholar, who rose to prominence for her eye-catching research into — among other things — dishonesty.
On Friday the Data Colada sleuths posted their fourth and final analysis of a paper of Gino’s, which found that when people adopt a mind-set about what they want to do, rather than what they should do, they are more likely to participate in networking. But word responses from some participants indicated that their overall answers had been altered, wrote the trio behind the blog: Joseph Simmons of the University of Pennsylvania; Uri Simonsohn of the Esade Business School, in Spain; and Leif Nelson of the University of California at Berkeley.
What’s more, they noted that their suspicions had been borne out: “We have received confirmation, from outside of Harvard, that Harvard’s investigators did look at the original [research software] data file and that the data had been modified.”
A retraction notice for the 2020 paper will appear in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a representative told The Chronicle.
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.
“At this time, we believe this to be an isolated incident,” Rose Sokol, the publisher of American Psychological Association journals and books, wrote by email. “However, we continue to be in touch with the institution, and if we have reason to consider retracting other articles, we will take appropriate steps.”
Gino’s co-authors on that paper — Maryam Kouchaki, a management professor at Northwestern University, and Tiziana Casciaro, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto — did not respond to requests for comment. The professors behind Data Colada have written 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.”
Gino did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement posted on LinkedIn last week, she said that she was aware of the accusations, but did not admit to or deny them. “As I continue to evaluate these allegations and assess my options, I am limited into what I can say publicly,” she wrote. “I want to assure you that I take them seriously and they will be addressed.”
Earlier in the week, Patricia Bauer, editor in chief of Psychological Science, told The Chronicle that the journal was in the process of retracting two of the other studies scrutinized by Data Colada.
One of those papers, published in 2015, found that experiencing inauthenticity leads people to feel immoral and impure. According to the bloggers, there were signs of tampering in data from respondents who had given unusual answers when asked to provide their class years. Gino’s co-authors — Kouchaki and Adam D. Galinsky, a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia University — did not return requests for comment.
In the other paper, released in 2014, data from some participants who cheated on a coin-toss task appeared to have been manually altered, according to Data Colada. That article’s conclusion: Acting dishonestly heightens creativity. Scott S. Wiltermuth, a co-author and a professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California, said by email that he had not been involved with the data collection.
The fourth paper that the Data Colada bloggers examined — and the first that they wrote about — was published in 2012. It found that signing an honesty pledge at the top of a form, rather than at the bottom, decreased cheating. A number of rows in the dataset appeared to have been manually tampered with, the data detectives wrote, in a way that bolstered the result that signing at the top decreased cheating.
But it can’t get retracted — because it already has been. That happened in the fall of 2021, after Data Colada found separate evidence of fraud in the third experiment in the paper. That data had been procured from an insurance company by only one co-author, Dan Ariely of Duke, who has denied being the one who fabricated it.
Another co-author, Max H. Bazerman of Harvard Business School, told The Chronicle that on the basis of newly unearthed alleged fraud in experiment No. 1, Harvard is now requesting that the retraction notice be updated accordingly. This week, a spokesperson for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said that the journal was “looking into the matter.”
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