Harvard professor who published research on honesty accused of fudging findings

A Harvard Business School behavioral scientist who co-authored widely-cited research on honesty has been accused of fabricating findings, the New York Times reported.

"As I continue to evaluate these allegations and assess my options, I am limited into what I can say publicly," Francesca Gino said in a post on LinkedIn to which she referred TheBlaze when reached for comment Sunday morning.

"I want to assure you that I take them seriously and they will be addressed," Gino also said in the post, adding that there will be "more to come on all of this."

Gino's work, among other topics, explores the effectiveness of simple interventions that could encourage honesty. For example, a widely-cited 2012 paper looked at whether people would be more honest in filling out tax or insurance documents if a question asking them to attest to their honesty were placed at the top of the form instead of the bottom, as explained in the NYT.

Questions about the the data underlying the published work of Harvard Business School's Francesca Gino came into question in a piece in the Chronicles of Higher Education earlier this month.

"The irony of this being a story about data fraud in a paper on inducing honesty is not lost on me," Harvard Business School's Max Bazerman, a co-author with Gino on one of the honesty studies in question, told CoHE.

Data Colada, a group blog that examines the integrity of social science research, launched a four-part series called "Data Falsificada" examining what they say is evidence of fraud in four papers authored by Gino. The first, entitled "Clusterfake," was published June 17. The most recent, part 3, was published Friday.

Data Colada analyzed a study Gino co-authored which measured research participants' honesty in a virtual coin flipping task. As in another study of Gino's they examined, Data Colada's authors say they found a "tell-tale sign of fraud" in the dataset that stemmed from how the data were sorted. Data Colada's authors also said they had identified which cells in the dataset had been tampered with and by how much the values had been changed.

Gino's page on Harvard Business School's website indicates she is on administrative leave. Gino was not listed as being on leave as recently as mid-May, according to the NYT.

Gino did not return requests for comment from the Chronicle of Higher Education nor the New York Times. Harvard Business School declined comment to the New York Times.

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