Over the past two decades, dozens of behavioral scientists
have risen to prominence pointing out the power of small interventions to
improve well-being.
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The scientists said they had found that automatically
enrolling people in organ donor programs would lead to higher rates of
donation, and that moving healthy foods like fruit closer to the front of a
buffet line would result in healthier eating.
Many of these findings have attracted skepticism as other
scholars showed that their effects were smaller than initially claimed, or that
they had little impact at all.
However, in recent days, the field may have sustained its
most serious blow yet: accusations that a prominent behavioral scientist
fabricated results in multiple studies, including at least one purporting to
show how to elicit honest behavior.
The scholar, Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, has
been a co-author of dozens of papers in peer-reviewed journals on such topics
as how rituals like silently counting to 10 before deciding what to eat can
increase the likelihood of choosing healthier food, and how networking can make
professionals feel dirty.
Findings of fraud
Maurice Schweitzer, a behavioral scientist at the Wharton
School of the University of Pennsylvania, said the accusations were having
large “reverberations in the academic community” because 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.
Behavioral work is common in psychology, management and
economics, and scholars can straddle these disciplines. According to her
résumé, Gino has a doctorate in economics and management from an Italian
university.
Questions about her work surfaced in an article June 16 in
The Chronicle of Higher Education about a 2012 paper written by Gino and four
colleagues.
One of Gino’s co-authors — Max H. Bazerman, also of Harvard
Business School — told the Chronicle that the university had informed him that
a study overseen by Gino for the paper appeared to include fabricated results.
The 2012 paper reported 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.
The paper has been cited hundreds of times by other
scholars, but more recent work had cast serious doubt on its findings.
Gino did not respond to a request for comment, and Harvard
Business School declined to comment. Reached by phone, a man who identified
himself as Gino’s husband said, “It’s obviously something that is very
sensitive that we can’t speak to now.”
Bazerman did not respond to a request for comment for this
article, but told The Chronicle of Higher Education that he had had nothing to
do with any fabrication.
On June 17, a blog run by three behavioral scientists,
called DataColada, posted a detailed discussion of evidence that the results of
a study by Gino for the 2012 paper had been falsified. The post said that the
bloggers contacted Harvard Business School in the fall of 2021 to raise
concerns about Gino’s work, providing the university with a report that
included evidence of fraud in the 2012 paper as well as in three other papers
on which she collaborated.
A focus on the integrity of social science research
The blog — by Uri Simonsohn of ESADE Business School in
Barcelona, Leif Nelson of the University of California, Berkeley, and Joseph
Simmons of the University of Pennsylvania — focuses on the integrity and
reliability of social science research. The post on Gino noted that Harvard had
placed her on administrative leave, a fact that was reflected on her business
school webpage, though no reason was given. The Internet Archive, which
catalogs webpages, shows that Gino was not on leave as recently as mid-May.
The 2012 paper was based on three separate studies. One
study overseen by Gino involved a lab experiment in which about 100
participants were asked to complete a worksheet featuring 20 puzzles and were
promised $1 for every puzzle they solved.
The study’s participants later filled out a form reporting
how much money they had earned from solving the puzzles. The participants were
led to believe that cheating would be undetected, when in fact the researchers
could verify how many puzzles they had solved.
The study found that participants were much more likely to
report their puzzle income honestly if they attested to the accuracy of their
responses at the top of the form rather than the bottom.
But in their blog post, Simonsohn, Nelson, and Simmons,
analyzing data that Gino and her co-authors had posted online, cited a digital
record contained within an Excel file to demonstrate that some of the data
points had been tampered with, and that the tampering helped drive the result.
In interviews and comments on social media, some scholars
said that findings in the genre of behavioral research that Gino specializes
in, which is closer to psychology, often resemble findings generated by
questionable research methods.
One category of questionable methods, said Colin Camerer, a
behavioral economist at the California Institute of Technology, is p-hacking —
for example, testing a series of arbitrary data combinations until the
researcher arrives at an inflated statistical correlation.
In 2015, a team of scholars reported that they had tried to
replicate the results of 100 studies published in prominent psychology journals
and succeeded in fewer than half the cases. The behavioral studies proved
especially hard to replicate.
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