Harvard Scholar’s Study on Honesty Retracted After She Is Accused of Faking It

A Harvard scholar who studies honesty has been accused of fabricating her findings on a research paper on the subject that has been highly cited by behavioral scientists. Harvard has placed Francesca Gina on administrative leave after her famous paper was retracted, a highly ironic position for an honesty expert to find herself in.

A famous study by Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School about a clever way to prompt honest behavior was retracted because it had relied on fraudulent data, according to a report by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The fraudulent study, which was published in 2012, has reportedly been cited hundreds of time by scholars.

While details about the falsifications remain unclear, Harvard has recently placed Gino, a world-renowned professor who studies dishonesty, on administrative leave after discovering that the study contains even more fraudulent data than what was previously revealed in 2021.

Gino has reportedly co-authored dozens of papers in peer-reviewed journals on several topics regarding behavior and honesty.

The 2012 paper in question had claimed that when people sign an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form, rather than at the end, they are less likely to cheat on the form. But in 2020, researchers of that paper, plus two others, acknowledged in a new paper that they were unable to replicate that effect after running larger versions of the same experiment.

The following year, a trio of data detectives published a blog post that a close examination pointed to fraud. The source of that fraud remained unclear.

Max H. Bazerman of Harvard Business School, one of the co-authors of Gino’s paper, declined to discuss his co-authors with the Chronicle, but reportedly reflected on the 2012 study in his book, “Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop,” which was published in November.

“In retrospect, Gino reported that her lab manager at her prior university managed data collection for the two laboratory experiments in the 2012 paper,” Bazerman wrote in a chapter about the risks of putting trust in relationships. “Thus, none of the authors, including me, provided sufficient supervision of these experiments.”

“In addition, as I review emails from 2011 containing the dialogue between coauthors of the 2012 paper, I see concerns raised about the methods. I failed to actively engage and deferred to the decisions of my colleagues, and that failure makes me complicit,” Bazerman added.

Bazerman went on to say that “The irony of this being a story about data fraud in a paper on inducing honesty is not lost on me.”

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