Irony alert: A behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School who is considered to be one of the leading scholars on honesty has been accused of fabricating data in multiple studies, reports Science. Francesca Gino has been called out by three peers in behavioral science at the data investigation blog Data Colada, per the Harvard Crimson. The trio says they have found evidence so far of bogus data in four studies, but "we believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data," they write. One is a famous 2012 paper asserting that people are more likely to be honest when filling out tax and insurance forms if they are asked to attest to the truth of their statements at the top of the form rather than the bottom.
The odd thing is that the paper already had been retracted because of fraudulent data by another of its co-authors. But Gino's contribution to the paper is now in doubt as well, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. "That's right: Two different people independently faked data for two different studies in a paper about dishonesty," write Uri Simonsohn, Joseph Simmons, and Leif Nelson in their Data Colada post. Gino is now on administrative leave and has not commented on the controversy. Nor has HBS.
"It's obviously something that is very sensitive that we can't speak to now," a man who identified himself as Gino's husband told the New York Times by phone. The controversy has rocked the academic world of behavioral science because Gino has "so many collaborators, so many articles, (and) is really a leading scholar in the field," says Maurice Schweitzer at the Wharton School. Schweitzer himself is now going over eight studies he co-authored with Gino, and other scholars in the field are doing the same. (More honesty stories.)
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