Some of the biggest names in behavioral science stand accused of faking their results. Last year, an astonishing 10,000 research papers were retracted. In a series originally published in early 2024, we talk to whistleblowers, reformers, and a co-author who got caught up in the chaos. (Part 1 of 2) SOURCES:Max Bazerman, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.Leif Nelson, professor of business administration at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business.Brian Nosek, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and executive director at the Center for Open Science.Joseph Simmons, professor of applied statistics and operations, information, and decisions at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.Uri Simonsohn, professor of behavioral science at Esade Business School.Simine Vazire, professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne and editor-in-chief of Psychological Science. RESOURCES:"More Than 10,000 Research Papers Were Retracted in 2023 — a New Record," by Richard Van Noorden (Nature, 2023)."Data Falsificada (Part 1): 'Clusterfake,'" by Joseph Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn (Data Colada, 2023)."Fabricated Data in Research About Honesty. You Can't Make This Stuff Up. Or, Can You?" by Nick Fountain, Jeff Guo, Keith Romer, and Emma Peaslee (Planet Money, 2023).Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop, by Max Bazerman (2022)."Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty," by Joseph Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn (Data Colada, 2021)."False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant," by Joseph Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn (Psychological Science, 2011). EXTRAS:"Why Do We Cheat, and Why Shouldn’t We?" by No Stupid Questions (2023)."Is Everybody Cheating These Days?" by No Stupid Questions (2021).
Chapter 1: What are the recent scandals in academia?
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. Over the holidays, we wanted to revisit one of our favorite series from this past year about a set of research scandals that have rocked the academic world. When we first played these episodes, we heard from a lot of listeners, including one who teaches AP research at a high school in Frisco, Texas. He made a crossword puzzle for his students based on our series.
Here's one clue. 39 across, five letters. The active fabrication of data is called... I'll give you a hint. The title of the episode you're about to hear is Why is there so much fraud in academia? We have updated facts and figures where necessary. Next week in part two, we will have an update from one of the fraud fighters. As always, thanks for listening.
A couple of years ago, Francesca Gino was, there's really no other way of putting it. She was a superstar, an academic superstar, at least.
Chapter 2: Who is Francesca Gino and why is she controversial?
She was at the center of everything. Being a prestigious faculty member at Harvard and all of her public speaking and her books. Her reputation was perfect. She was synonymous with the highest levels of research in organizational behavior. She's just a giant in the field.
The field in which Gino is a giant, where her reputation was perfect, is variously called behavioral science or decision science or organizational psychology.
According to her website at the Harvard Business School, where she has been a professor of business administration, Gino's research focuses on why people make the decisions they do at work and how leaders and employees can have more productive, creative, and fulfilling lives. Who wouldn't want that?
Gino became a superstar by publishing a great number of research papers in academic journals as well as a couple of books. Her latest is called Rebel Talent, Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life. She produced the kind of camera-ready research that plays perfectly into the virtuous circle of academic superstars.
A journal article is amplified by the publisher or university into the mainstream media, which feeds a headline to all the firms and institutions who are eager to exploit the next behavioral science insight. And this, in turn, generates an even greater appetite for more useful research. The academic who is capable of steadily producing such work is treated almost like an oracle.
There are TED talks to be given, books to be written, consulting jobs to be had. Francesca Gino, for instance, gave talks or consulted for Google, Disney, Walmart, for the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy, and many more. But that's all over for now.
In July of 2023, Harvard Business School, responding to an analysis by academic whistleblowers, investigated Gino's work and found that she had, quote, intentionally, knowingly or recklessly committed research misconduct. Gino was suspended without pay. She then sued Harvard and the whistleblowers.
Those same whistleblowers have also produced evidence of what they call data fraud by an even more prominent behavioral scientist, Dan Ariely of Duke. Ariely has enjoyed the spotlight for many years, going back to his 2008 book, Predictably Irrational, The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Ariely claims that Duke investigated and cleared him of accusations of data fraud.
Although Duke has declined to say anything publicly about the investigation, Ariely And when it comes to academic fraud, universities have a habit of downplaying charges against their superstar professors for the obvious reason that it reflects poorly on them. Meanwhile, Dan Ariely's book lives on as the basis for an NBC crime drama called The Irrational, now in its second season.
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Chapter 3: How has academic fraud been investigated?
It stars Jesse L. Martin as a professor who uses behavioral psychology to help solve crimes.
What was it you did back there?
Paradoxical persuasion. I overly embraced his idea to force him to think it through enough to realize it was a terrible idea. And how did you know he wasn't going to pull the trigger? It works about 95% of the time. And the other 5%? There's always our liar, Clarissa.
Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino have both maintained that they never fabricated data for their research. Neither of them agreed to record an interview for this episode, but one of their co-authors did. Certainly, I felt a moral obligation to correct the record. Today on Freakonomics Radio, we'll hear from him as well as the three data detectives who blew the whistle on Gino and Ariely.
So I would say I have on the falsity of the findings. I don't have reasonable doubt.
But this is a much bigger story than two high-profile cases in behavioral science. We will get into the incentives that produce academic fraud.
If you were just a rational agent acting in the most self-interested way possible as a researcher in academia, I think you would cheat.
We will hear what's being done to change that and, most important, why this matters. Because the research fraud in academia extends well beyond academia and it has consequences for all of us. The first of a two-part series begins right now.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
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Chapter 4: What are the incentives that lead to academic fraud?
So when you think about it, why shouldn't we expect cheating even among scientific researchers? Consider this. Today, it is thought that Ptolemy, the second-century Greek astronomer, faked his observations to fit his theories. And a new study in the journal Nature found that last year, more than 10,000 research articles were retracted, easily breaking the old record.
While a lot of the recent headlines are about scholars at big-name American universities, the countries with the most retractions were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia, and China.
Fraud has existed since science has existed. And that's primarily because humans are doing the science. And people come with ideas, beliefs, motivations, reasons that they're doing the research that they do. And in some cases, people are so motivated to advance an idea or themselves that they are willing to change the evidence fraudulently to advance that idea or themselves.
That is Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. In 2013, he founded the Center for Open Science, a nonprofit that tries to improve the integrity of scientific research. Just to get it out of the way, I asked Nosek where his funding comes from.
Our funders include NIH, NSF, NASA, and DARPA as federal sources, and then a variety of private sources such as the John Templeton Foundation, Arnold Foundation, and many others. And that diverse group of funders – and it's quite diverse – I think share the recognition that the substantive things that they are trying to solve –
won't be solved very effectively if the work itself is not done credibly.
In other words, the stakes here are high, higher than just individual academic researchers trying to advance their careers. If your goal is to improve medicine or transportation or immigration policy, any area where decisions are based on academic research, you don't want that research to be compromised.
There are specific cases where a finding gets translated into public policy or into some type of activity that then ends up actually damaging people, lives, treatments, solutions. One of the most prominent examples is the Wakefield scandal relating to development of autism and the notion that vaccines might contribute to
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Chapter 5: How does the academic reward system impact research integrity?
And that has had an incredibly corrosive impact on public health, on people's beliefs about the sources of autism, the impacts of vaccines, et cetera. And that is very costly for the world. There's also a local cost in academic research, which is just a ton of waste.
So even if it doesn't have public downstream consequences, if a false idea is in the literature and other people are trying to build on it, it's just waste, waste, waste, waste.
There's also the idea that as much as universities worry about their students cheating, like using chat GPT to write a paper, what kind of example are their professors setting? And there's one more big reason this story is so frustrating, and that has to do with the standards of academic research.
The general view, at least this is the view that I have long held, is that academic research exists in a special category. It is a fact-finding coalition that operates under a set of rules built around the accurate gathering and analysis of data, with the entire process subject to fact-checking and peer review. Good journalism operates under similar rules.
The New York Times has an old mission statement I've always liked. It goes, to give the news impartially without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved. I've always thought this mission applies to academic research as well, that it's meant to be not only accurate, but free of personal or financial interests.
These research papers aren't being written by some political official or management consultant or equity analyst. They're being written by someone so devoted to their field of research that they went through the hell of getting a PhD in order to spend their days doing that research.
But the fact that Brian Nosek has been kept very busy with his Center for Open Science suggests that my faith in academic research has been misplaced. I asked Nosek to walk me through how he went from being a researcher himself to being a new sort of referee.
Yeah, I have always had an interest in how to do good science as a principled matter. And in doing that, we in the lab would work on developing tools and resources to be more transparent with our work, to try to be more rigorous with our work, to try to do higher powered research. more sensitive research designs.
And so I wrote grant applications to say, can we make a repository where people can share their data? This is like 2007. And they would get polarized reviews where some reviewers would say, this would change everything. It'd be so useful to be more transparent with our work. And others saying, but researchers don't like sharing their data. Why would we do that?
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Chapter 6: What is the role of whistleblowers in exposing fraud?
Yeah, this was the German anesthesiologist who had almost 200 papers retracted. Oh, yeah. I gather there were people actually dying as a result of this faulty research. So I am curious to ask you, in which academic fields or disciplines do you think – fraud or sloppiness is most prominent?
We can't say with any confidence where it's most prominent. We can only say that the incentives for doing it are everywhere. And some of them gain more attention because, for example, Francesca's findings are interesting. They're interesting to everyone. So of course, they're going to get some attention to that. Whereas the anesthesiologist's findings are not interesting. They put people to sleep.
Until they kill you. Well, yeah, I guess they put you, and then they kill you.
But it does seem like your field of training, psychology, and especially social psychology, is a hotbed of, I wouldn't say fraud, but certainly controversy and overturned findings over the years.
Chapter 7: How can we improve the integrity of academic research?
Yeah, I would say that there is a lot of attention to social psychology for two reasons. One is that it has public engagement interest value. That's a way of saying that people care about your findings. people care about, at least in the sense of, oh, that's interesting to learn, right? But the other reason is that social psychology has bothered to look.
And I think social psychology became a hotbed for this because the actual challenges in the social system of science that need to be addressed are social psychological problems. What do you mean by that? I mean like the reward system, how it is that people might rationalize and use motivated reasoning to come to findings that are less credible.
A lot of these problems are ones that social psychologists spend every day thinking about.
I asked Nosek why he thinks that presumably honest people might over time come to behave dishonestly.
The case that people make to say that this is a bigger problem now is that the competition for attention, jobs, advancement is very high, perhaps greater than it's ever been.
Do you think that's been driven by the shrinking of tenure positions at universities?
Yeah. So there are many more people and many fewer positions, which is an obvious challenge for a competitive marketplace. And there are now pathways for public attention that have even bigger impact. Academics, by and large, didn't think about ways to get rich. They looked for ways to have time to think about the problems that they want to think about. But now they have pathways to get rich.
Those pathways have benefited many people, myself included, even though I am not an academic. Thanks to my partnership with Steve Levitt, who's an economist at the University of Chicago, I have had more opportunities than I ever would have thought possible, including this show. I have wondered why there seems to be so much less shady research in economics than in psychology and other fields.
When you talk to economists, they'll give you several reasons. Economic research is very mathy and it comes with a lot of what they call robustness checks. There is also a tradition of, let's say, aggressive debate within academic economics.
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Chapter 8: What is the future of trust in academic research?
Yuri Simonson. I'm a professor of behavioral science at the Asada Business School in Barcelona.
Joe Simmons. I'm a faculty member at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Nelson, Simonson and Simmons are, let's call it mid-career academic researchers. They've been at it for a while and they hold high status positions within the ecosystem they are concerned about. They've all published widely in top journals of psychology and decision science.
So they're coming at this not only from the inside, but with inside knowledge of how academic research works and doesn't work. So they focus on examining the methodology used in this kind of research.
What motivated our whole journey into methodology was that we would go to conferences or read papers and not believe them. And we would find that whenever a finding didn't align with our intuition, We would trust our intuition over the finding. And that was, it sort of defeated the whole purpose. Like if you're only believing things you already believe, then why bother?
This guy, Daryl Ben, published a nine study paper with eight studies worth of statistically significant evidence that people have ESP. And most people were like, what is going on? Like this, this cannot be. A true finding.
So the idea was like, how do we show people that you can really very easily produce evidence of anything? So we thought, let's start with something that's obviously false. We said, OK, something that's quite hard to do is to make people younger. We've been trying forever. We never succeeded. So let's show that we can do that in a silly way.
So we decided to show that we can make people younger by listening to a song by the Beatles. The song was When I'm 64, correct? That's right. And so the idea is, if we can make anything significant, one way to prove it is to say, I'm going to show you with statistical significant evidence that people got younger after they listened to When I'm 64.
They ran real lab experiments with real research subjects who had real birthdates and played them real songs. When I'm 64 and two others.
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