Scandal Grows

On and off in this blog, we have referred to the scandal and controversy at the Harvard Business School regarding seemingly-fake behavioral results of one academic. The Atlantic carries a story dated Nov. 19 that suggests the scandal runs deeper, and covers more individuals and institutions. You can find it at:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/business-school-fraud-research/680669/

If you can't get access through that link, let yours truly know. But here is an excerpt from the beginning of the article that gives the flavor:

...Business-school psychologists are scholars, but they aren’t shooting for a Nobel Prize. Their research doesn’t typically aim to solve a social problem; it won’t be curing anyone’s disease. It doesn’t even seem to have much influence on business practices, and it certainly hasn’t shaped the nation’s commerce. Still, its flashy findings come with clear rewards: consulting gigs and speakers’ fees, not to mention lavish academic incomes. Starting salaries at business schools can be $240,000 a year—double what they are at campus psychology departments, academics told me.

The research scandal that has engulfed this field goes far beyond the replication crisis that has plagued psychology and other disciplines in recent years. Long-standing flaws in how scientific work is done—including insufficient sample sizes and the sloppy application of statistics—have left large segments of the research literature in doubt. Many avenues of study once deemed promising turned out to be dead ends. But it’s one thing to understand that scientists have been cutting corners. It’s quite another to suspect that they’ve been creating their results from scratch... 

Of course, publish-or-perish has long been around as an academic incentive plan. The idea that it's not just publishing that is the way to succeed, but also publishing what the author terms "flashy findings" is the route to reward, isn't new either. What is new, or at least newer, is that academia is facing political and social critiques that it seems ill-eqipped to deal with. Scandals of this type don't help.