Liar liar pants on fire! A Harvard professor who studies honesty has been accused of fraud

Francesca Gino, a prominent Harvard Business School (HBS) professor known for her studies on honesty, has been accused of data fraud. Allegations against Gino surfaced in recent weeks, with claims that she falsified results in several behavioural science studies.

How did her lies come to light?

As per the Guardian, Harvard informed Max Bazerman, an HBS professor and co-author of a 2012 paper with Gino, that it believed one of the studies overseen by Gino had falsified results.

The paperin question was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and later retracted. It focused on an experiment involving participants filling out tax and insurance paperwork.

It claimed that participants who signed truthfulness declarations at the top of the page were more honest than those who signed at the bottom.

"Many written forms required by businesses and governments rely on honest reporting. Proof of honest intent is typically provided through signature at the end of, eg, tax returns or insurance policy forms. Still, people sometimes cheat to advance their financial self-interests at great costs to society. We test an easy-to-implement method to discourage dishonesty: signing at the beginning rather than at the end of a self-report, thereby reversing the order of the current practice," said the study's abstract.

According to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bazerman, Harvard, provided "compelling evidence" of data falsification, including the findings that someone accessed a database and added and altered data.

More proof?

In response to the allegations, a blog called DataColoda, run by three behavioural science academics, published a series of posts detailing extensive evidence of alleged fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Gino.

The blog authors shared their concerns with Harvard Business School in 2021 and believe that many more papers authored by Gino may contain fake data.

"We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade, including papers published quite recently (in 2020)," wrote blog authors, ESADE Business School's Uri Simonsohn, University of California, Berkeley’s Leif Nelson, and University of Pennsylvania’s Joseph Simmons.

They said,"In the fall of 2021, we shared our concerns with Harvard Business School. Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud. We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens."Francesca Gino's HBS profile indicates that she is currently on administrative leave.

(With inputs from agencies)

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