The day almost two years ago when Harvard Business School informed Francesca Gino, a prominent professor, that she was being investigated for data fraud also happened to be her husband’s 50th birthday. An administrator instructed her to turn in any Harvard-issued computer equipment that she had by 5 p.m. She canceled the birthday celebration she had planned and walked the machines to campus, where a University Police officer oversaw the transfer.
“We ended up both going,” Dr. Gino recalled. “I couldn’t go on my own because I felt like, I don’t know, the earth was opening up under my feet for reasons that I couldn’t understand.”
The school told Dr. Gino it had received allegations that she manipulated data in four papers on topics in behavioral science, which straddles fields like psychology, marketing and economics.
Dr. Gino published the four papers under scrutiny from 2012 to 2020, and fellow academics had cited one of them more than 500 times. The paper found that asking people to attest to their truthfulness at the top of a tax or insurance form, rather than at the bottom, made their responses more accurate because it supposedly activated their ethical instincts before they provided information.
Though she did not know it at the time, Harvard had been alerted to the evidence of fraud a few months earlier by three other behavioral scientists who publish a blog called Data Colada, which focuses on the validity of social science research. The bloggers said it appeared that Dr. Gino had tampered with data to make her studies appear more impressive than they were. In some cases, they said, someone had moved numbers around in a spreadsheet so that they better aligned with her hypothesis. In another paper, data points appeared to have been altered to exaggerate the finding.
Their tip set in motion an investigation that, roughly two years later, would lead Harvard to place Dr. Gino on unpaid leave and seek to revoke her tenure — a rare step akin to career death for an academic. It has prompted her to file a defamation lawsuit against the school and the bloggers, in which she is seeking at least $25 million, and has stirred up a debate among her Harvard colleagues over whether she has received due process.
Harvard said it “vehemently denies” Dr. Gino’s allegations, and a lawyer for the bloggers called the lawsuit “a direct attack on academic inquiry.” ...
The full story is at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/30/business/the-harvard-professor-and-the-bloggers.html.
As blog readers will know, we have in other contexts - mainly concerning Title IX procedures - emphasized the importance of following due process. It is quite possible that Harvard deviated from due process in the Gino case. High profile situations can increase pressure on administrators to do something. We'll let the litigation play out and it's quite possible Harvard will make some kind of deal to rid itself of this case.
Yours truly is not sympathetic, however, with Gino's lawsuit against the researchers who operate under the title Data Colada and who identified irregulaties in her data sets. They did not say she did it. They did say there were data anomalies in papers bearing her name. Her defense seems to be that maybe there were irregularities but someone else did it or there is some other explanation. The juxtaposition of seeming anomalies and her name isn't disputed. So, at most the issue is that - perhaps - Harvard didn't follow proper procedures investigating the reported findings and in its subsequent decision making.
In any case, there is major negative fallout to the field of behavioral research. The NY Times article concludes:
In an interview, Dr. Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, suggested that while the efforts of scholars like the Data Colada bloggers had helped restore credibility to behavioral science, the field may be hard-pressed to recover entirely. “When I see a surprising finding, my default is not to believe it,” he said of published papers. “Twelve years ago, my default was to believe anything that was surprising.”
And there is larger fallout against higher ed more generally. The sins of behavioral science tend to be projected to unrelated fields in the minds of the general public.
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