A Harvard Business School professor who has published widely cited papers on honesty and behavioral science has been accused of falsifying data in several studies, raising questions about the integrity and methods of the field.
Francesca Gino, who has a Ph.D. in economics and management from an Italian university, has been a co-author of dozens of papers in peer-reviewed journals on topics such as how rituals can increase the likelihood of choosing healthier food, and how networking can make professionals feel dirty. She has been placed on leave by Harvard and has not responded to requests for comment.
The accusations surfaced in mid-June, when one of her co-authors, Max Bazerman, also of Harvard Business School, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the university had informed him that one of the studies overseen by Gino for a 2012 paper appeared to include fabricated results. The paper, which was later retracted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claimed that asking people who fill out tax or insurance documents to attest to the truth of their responses at the top of the document rather than at the bottom significantly increased the accuracy of the information they provided.
Bazerman said that the university provided a 14-page document that included “compelling evidence” of data falsification, including the discovery that someone accessed a database and added and altered data in the file. He denied any involvement in the alleged data tampering, saying: “I did not have anything to do with the fabrication.”
A day later, a blog run by three behavioral scientists presented evidence of fraud in four papers co-authored by Gino, spanning over a decade. They said they discovered data tampering, duplication, and manipulation in the papers. “We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade, including papers published quite recently (in 2020),” wrote Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson, and Joseph Simmons, authors of the blog DataColada.
The accusations have caused large reverberations in the academic community and raised questions about the ethical standards and methods of behavioral research. Maurice Schweitzer, a behavioral scientist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a collaborator of Gino, said: “The accusations were having large ‘reverberations in the academic community’ because Dr. Gino is someone who has ‘so many collaborators, so many articles, who is really a leading scholar in the field.’”
Schweitzer said that he was now going through the eight papers on which he collaborated with Gino for indications of fraud, and that many other scholars were doing so as well. He noted that some of Gino’s papers had been influential in shaping policy and practice in various domains.
In an ironic twist in the world of behavioral science, a Harvard professor who studies honesty has been accused of data fraud. The scandal may have sustained its most serious blow yet to a field that has already faced criticism for its small interventions and weak effects. As Noam Scheiber wrote for The New York Times: “Over the past two decades, dozens of behavioral scientists have risen to prominence pointing out the power of small interventions to improve well-being. … But in recent days, the field may have sustained its most serious blow yet: accusations that a prominent behavioral scientist fabricated results in multiple studies.”
Relevant articles:
Harvard professor who studies honesty accused of falsifying data in studies, The Guardian, 25 Jun 2023
Harvard’s Francesca Gino, Dishonesty Expert, Is Accused of Fraud, The New York Times, 24 Jun 2023
Harvard expert on rule-breaking accused of fraud, Boing Boing, 21 Jun 2023
Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino Accused of Committing Data Fraud, The Harvard Crimson, 23 Jun 2023