Irony alert: A prominent Harvard Business School researcher who studies dishonesty and unethical behavior has been accused of falsifying data.
Complaints against Francesca Gino cover work that goes back over a decade and renewed criticism of the field of behavioral economics in which she labors. Behavioral economics offers invaluable insight into how we as individuals are hardwired for suboptimal performance; fixing those shortcomings won’t solve big societal problems but it can help us address them better.
Gino has contributed to over 100 academic papers during her career and parlayed that knowledge into consulting work for some of the world’s leading companies. Researchers at Data Colada blog, which examines evidence in behavioral science studies, looked at the data in one of her studies — it assessed the impact of signing a “declaration of honesty” at the start, rather than the end, of a tax return — and found that it appeared to have been altered, concluding that there is “evidence of fraud in four academic papers.” They warned that “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.”