Over the past two decades, dozens of behavioral scientists have come to the fore in pointing to the power of small interventions to improve well-being.
The scientists said they found that automatically enrolling people in organ donor programs would lead to higher donation rates, 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 sparked skepticism, as other scholars have shown that their effects were smaller than initially claimed, or that they had no impact at all. But in recent days, the field has taken perhaps its hardest blow yet: Allegations fabricated by a prominent behavioral scientist result in multiple studies, including at least one that claims to show how to elicit honest behavior.
The scholar, Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, has co-authored dozens of papers in peer-reviewed journals on topics such as how rituals such as silently counting to 10 before deciding what to eat can increase the likelihood of choosing healthier foods, and how networking can make professionals feel dirty.
Maurice Schweitzer, a behavioral scientist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said the allegations “had great resonance in the academic community” because Dr. Gino is someone who “has so many contributors, so many articles, who is really a leading scholar in the field.”
Dr. Schweitzer said he was now going through the eight papers he collaborated on with Dr. Gino for evidence of fraud, and that many other scholars did as well.
Behavioral work is common in psychology, management, and economics, and scientists can bridge these disciplines. According to her resume, Dr. Gino a Ph.D. in economics and management from an Italian university.
Questions about her work surfaced on June 16 in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a 2012 paper written by Dr. Gino and four colleagues. One of dr. Gino’s co-authors – Max H. Bazerman, also of Harvard Business School – told The Chronicle that the university informed him that a study overseen by Dr. Gino before the paper seemed to have fabricated results.
The 2012 newspaper reported that asking people filling out tax or insurance documents to confirm the truth of their answers at the top of the document rather than at the bottom of the document significantly increased the accuracy of the information provided. The article has been cited hundreds of times by other scholars, but more recent work had cast serious doubt on its findings.
Dr. 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 Dr. Gino: “Obviously it’s something very sensitive that we can’t talk to right now.”
Dr. Bazerman did not respond to a request for comment for this article, but told The Chronicle of Higher Education that he had nothing to do with any fabrication.
On June 17, a blog by three behavioral scientists called DataColada posted a detailed discussion of the evidence that the results of a study by Dr. Gino before the 2012 paper were forged. The post stated that the bloggers reached out to Harvard Business School in Fall 2021 to raise concerns about Dr. Gino, providing the university with a report showing evidence of fraud in the 2012 paper and three other papers she contributed to. .
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 Dr. Gino noted that Harvard had placed her on administrative leave, a fact that was reflected on her business school’s web page, though no reason was given. The Internet Archive, which catalogs web pages, shows that Dr. Gino not so recently as was on leave in mid-May.
The 2012 paper was based on three separate studies. A study supervised by Dr. Gino involved a lab experiment in which about 100 participants were asked to complete a worksheet of 20 puzzles and were promised $1 for each puzzle they solved.
The study participants later filled out a form reporting how much money they had made solving the puzzles. The participants were led to believe that cheating would go undetected, when in fact the researchers were able to verify how many puzzles they had solved.
The study found that participants were much more likely to honestly report their puzzle income if they confirmed the correctness of their answers at the top of the form, rather than at the bottom.
But in their blog post, Dr. Simonson, Dr. Nelson and Dr. Simmons, who analyzed data that Dr. Gino and her co-authors had posted online a digital record in an Excel file to show that some of the data had been tampered with, and that the tampering helped drive the result.
Last week’s post wasn’t the first time the DataColada watchdogs found problems with Dr. Gino and her co-authors. In a blog post in August 2021, the same researchers found evidence that another study published in the same paper appeared to rely on fabricated data.
That study was based on data from an insurance company, to which customers reported the mileage of cars covered by their policy. The research found that customers who were asked at the top of the form to confirm the truthfulness of the information they would provide were significantly more honest than customers who were asked at the bottom of the form to confirm their truthfulness.
But through analysis of the raw data, Dr. Simonson, Dr. Nelson and Dr. Simmons that many of the data points were created by someone connected to the study, not from customer information. The journal that published the 2012 article, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pulled it in a month after the blog post appeared.
In that case, another co-author of the paper, Dan Ariely of Duke University, was the scholar who obtained the data from the insurance company. Dr. Ariely, one of the world’s best-known behavioral scientists, said in an email Friday that he was “stunned and surprised” to learn that some of the paper’s insurance data had been fabricated, “which prompted me to proactively retract.”
DataColada has since published blog posts proving that the results were fabricated in two other papers Dr. Gino co-authored. The bloggers have written that they plan to publish another post detailing issues in an additional paper she contributed to.
In interviews and social media comments, several scholars said they had no suspicion of fraud in Dr. Gino. But some noted that the findings in the genre of behavioral research in which she specializes, 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 random combinations of data until the researcher arrives at an inflated statistical correlation.
In 2015, a team of scientists reported that they had tried to replicate the results of 100 studies published in leading psychology journals and succeeded in less than half of the cases. The behavioral studies in particular proved difficult to replicate.
