Harvard professor who studies honesty accused of fraud | Trending

Francesca Gino, a well-known Harvard Business School (HBS) professor, is scrutinised for falsifying multiple studies, including one on eliciting honest behaviour. Gino, who co-authored over 135 academic papers in peer-reviewed journals, faces accusations of fabricating data in her numerous studies, which Harvard has been investigating for over a year. The Harvard Business School professor has co-authored over 135 academic papers in peer-reviewed journals. (Getty Images) Max Bazerman, a professor at HBS and co-author of a 2012 paper with Francesca Gino, revealed that Harvard had informed him that one of the studies Gino used fraudulent data, reported The Chronicle of Higher Education. Bazerman added that Harvard provided a 14-page compelling evidence of data tampering, including unauthorised database access and file manipulation. He denied involvement in the alleged data falsification and told the news outlet, “I did not have anything to do with the fabrication.” The paper in question is titled “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end”. Published in August 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the study surrounds an experiment that asked participants to fill up tax and insurance paperwork. The paper claimed that participants who signed truthfulness declarations at the top of a page exhibited more honesty than those who signed at the bottom. In September 2021, PNAS retracted this paper. The paper’s abstract reads, “Many written forms required businesses and governments rely on honest reporting. Proof of honest intent is typically provided through signature at the end of, eg, tax returns or insurance policy forms. Still, people sometimes cheat to advance their financial self-interests at great costs to society. We test an easy-to-implement method to discourage dishonesty: signing at the beginning rather than at the end of a self-report, there reversing the order of the current practice.” Additional concerns were raised when three behavioural scholars wrote a detailed four-part blog on DataColoda on June 17, 2023, presenting substantial evidence regarding the alleged fraud in four academic papers co-authored Francesca Gino. The blog authors are Uri Simonsohn of ESADE Business School, University of California, Berkeley’s Leif Nelson, and Joseph Simmons of the University of Pennsylvania. It is worth noting that only ‘Part 1: Clusterfake’ of the four-part post has been published, and the remaining will be published soon. “In 2021, we and a team of anonymous researchers examined a number of studies co-authored Gino, because we had concerns that they contained fraudulent data. We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade, including papers published quite recently (in 2020),” the introduction of the blog read. The blog authors, in the next few lines, added, “In the fall of 2021, we shared our concerns with Harvard Business School. Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud. We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.” “We understand that Harvard had access to much more information than we did, including, where applicable, the original data collected using Qualtrics survey software. If the fraud was carried out collecting real data on Qualtrics and then altering the downloaded data files, as is likely to be the case for three of these papers, then the original Qualtrics files would provide airtight evidence of fraud. (Conversely, if our concerns were misguided, then those files would provide airtight evidence that they were misguided),” they further wrote in the blog. To the best of the knowledge of the scholars who wrote the blog, none of Gino’s co-authors carried out or assed her with collecting data for the studies that have raised questions. Gino, currently on adminrative leave per her HBS profile, has not publicly commented on the allegations. Her husband, speaking to the New York Times, declined to address the matter due to its sensitivity. He said, “It’s obviously something that is very sensitive that we can’t speak to now.” The outlet also reported that Harvard Business School has declined to comment on the matter. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Arfa Javaid is a journal working with the Hindustan Times’ Delhi team. She covers trending topics, human interest stories, and viral content online. …view detail