There's plenty of evidence that a LOT of academia involves Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype, as Stuart Ritchie has written about
here. And not just in the "soft" subjects where it doesn't matter to anyone whether, say, s
omeone plagiarized a book about Thomas Paine and got a load of facts wrong, or even in subjects where we might draw conclusions about people's
honesty from papers which were themselves written using fabricated data, as
in the case of Dan Ariely and Franscesca Gino. The former is still a professor at Duke University, and Franscesca Gino is involved in a lawsuit with Harvard University. They were already fairly well-known, particularly in certain fields, but most of the blowback to their research issues have been confined to fairly obscure outlets.
Whoah! Remember when I brought up Dan Ariely earlier, all those of you afficianados of academic fraud, institutional cover and celebrity status gurus?
Well, Ariely is quite a big name in behavioural economics. He's had some bestsellers, like
Predictably Irrational (which I read and
mostly enjoyed - the "mostly" thing is there because I did have some nagging concerns when I read it, but he's a good writer and his prose smooths over some of doubts), he's had
Ted Talks (he's an engaging speaker!), and
an inspiring background story of overcoming adversity such as when he was badly burned, which formed the basis of his understanding that humans had flawed brains - his nurses did everything wrong according to his later research into how humans experience pain (!). Whether Ariely is correct that the nurses should have taken the bandages off slower even if prolonged the pain, rather than quickly and painfully is not something I can judge, and I wonder too if it is really something Ariely can judge either and whether his research genuinely answered that question.
But that's beside the point, we are here to talk about fraud, after all.
And in this case we are talking about fraud in the field of research into the topic of ...
honesty!
That's quite ironic really, isn't it! Well, Ariely was somewhat implicated in an earlier study in which he and his research colleagues, including the now disgraced Franscesca Gino, claimed that by signing your name at the top of a document made it far more likely that the person signing it would be honest in such areas as insurance claims. The theory seems to be that by prominsing in advance makes people more likely to hold themselves to account rather than writing everything out and then signing their pledge to be honest at the end of a document.
Well, in that previous study, Gino almost certainly fudged her figures, but the part of the study that Ariely was responsible for also appeared to have very dubious numbers as well.
Data Colada give an account of it here. Ariely claimed he had no idea how that happened and suggested it was the insurance companies who had somehow given him numbers that were, in retrospect, too good to be true. The paper, "
Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end" has since been retracted,
but Duke University cleared him of wrong-doing:
Duke finally completed its investigation in January, Ariely told Business Insider. He said the university concluded that data from the honesty-pledge paper had been falsified but found no evidence that Ariely used fake data knowingly. Duke said its policy is to keep such investigations — even their existence — confidential, declining to comment further. While Ariely has resumed his work at Duke, he said he couldn't comment on specific disciplinary actions he may be facing. However, last month, his status as a James B. Duke Professor — the equivalent of a prestigious "distinguished professor" title at other universities — disappeared from his bio on Duke's website, something Ariely said he is appealing.
The whole process has exhausted Ariely. Academia, he said, "needs some therapy."
"When people do take a risk and they succeed, everybody enjoys it," Ariely told BI. "But when they lose, they're left hanging out to dry."
Anyway, it looks as though
Ariely has been caught again, albeit in an older paper on procrastination. This contains some retrospectively rather hilarious examples of fraud. Look at this table that
Data Colada have highlighed to show obvious duplication of data:
Notice that S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, S7, S9, S10 have been copied and pasted to S11, S12, etc... respectively? Just a few little tweaks to throw people off with the S8.
In fact, by this time, it looks like Duke have already had enough of him, mostly because of the correspondence found between him and Jeffrey Epstein, and they shuttered his lab.
Without looking into that correspondence myself, I doubt that there is much incriminating about it, but it is likely just bad PR for Duke. My guess is that the lesser sin of emailing Epstein counts for more than the egregious sin of data fraud.
And ultimately doesn't it all come down to PR in the end?
