The work of a renowned Harvard Business School professor who researches dishonesty has been under fire since she was accused of fabricating data in at least four academic papers.
The allegations against Francesca Gino, a leading behavioral scientist who has also cowritten dozens of other papers published in top peer-reviewed journals, have been detailed in recent reports, raising fears in academia that the alleged data tampering may involve a larger body of scholarship.
Two of the articles were retracted earlier this month from the journal that published them and a third is slated to be retracted in September. The fourth, a study about discouraging dishonesty, was retracted in 2021.
Gino, whose research primarily examines the psychology of workplace decision making and has often focused on honesty, has been a professor of business administration at Harvard since 2014. She has written books, including the 2018 “Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and Life,” and provided speaking and consulting services to powerful corporations. Her work has been featured by many media outlets, including The Boston Globe.
Gino is on administrative leave, according to her Harvard faculty webpage, which no longer mentions the title she held as the Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration. No explanation was given. A bio and résumé on Gino’s personal website state that the titled post ended this year.
The annual Oslo Business Forum in Norway — whose lineup of conference speakers this fall includes business magnate Richard Branson and activist Malala Yousafzai — removed Gino from its agenda in June, citing the fraud allegations.
Gino did not respond to questions about the allegations in an email to the Globe, instead referring to a LinkedIn statement. In the post, Gino responded to “recent reports concerning my work.”
“As I continue to evaluate these allegations and assess my options, I am limited into what I can say publicly,” she wrote. “I want to assure you that I take them seriously and they will be addressed.”
Harvard Business School declined to comment.
Michael Kalichman, a University of California, San Diego, professor emeritus and founding director of its Research Ethics Program, cautioned that it’s not yet clear who was responsible for the data issues.
“I’m not prepared — and I don’t think anybody should be prepared — to say that Francesca Gino has fabricated data. What we know so far is that some of the data that came out of her research group has raised questions and can’t be trusted,” Kalichman said. “But where the fault lies is not yet known.”
Kalichman said researchers have incentive to cut corners, driven by a pervasive “publish or perish” mentality in academia that sees success as a measure of how many papers they get published. That pressure can lead some to overlook their errors or even rationalize wrongdoing, he said.
Ivan Oransky, cofounder of the blog Retraction Watch, said retractions are “quite routine” and there are thousands a year.
Getting work published sets in motion a critical snowball effect, he said, positioning scholars to receive desirable professional opportunities: jobs, promotions, grants, and speaking engagements.
“It’s actually, frankly, surprising that more people don’t fudge data,” Oransky said.
High-profile cases involving accusations of academic fraud are nothing new.
In 2011, Diederik Stapel, a prominent Dutch social psychologist, was accused of research fraud and has had more than 50 articles retracted — a watershed case that spurred academics to take action against issues of misconduct, replication, and reproducibility. Last month, neuroscientist and president of Stanford University Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned after an external review found manipulated data in several of his studies, though it did not find evidence that he had tampered with the data himself.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in June about concerns surrounding an influential 2012 paper about honesty authored by Gino and four other researchers. The paper found that signing an honesty pledge at the beginning of a written form rather than at the end reduced dishonest behavior.
Harvard notified Max H. Bazerman, one of the paper’s other authors, that month that it believed one of the experiments involved had used fraudulent data, Bazerman told The Chronicle. The university said an internal analysis concluded that someone had added and changed data in the study, the article reported.
Bazerman, a Harvard Business School professor, told The Chronicle that he took no part in the alleged fabrication.
A day after The Chronicle’s report, three behavioral scientists posted on their investigative research blog, Data Colada, that data in that same study had been manipulated to help produce desirable results.
That blog post on Data Colada, which is run by Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson, and Joseph Simmons, professors at Esade Business School in Spain, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, was the first of four focusing on four papers cowritten by Gino alleged to contain fraudulent data.
Last month’s reports of academic fraud added the latest layer of controversy to the 2012 paper. Researchers including the paper’s original authors failed to replicate its findings in 2020, and a year later, Data Colada alleged to have uncovered evidence of fraud in another one of the paper’s experiments, which used data provided by a vehicle insurance company.
In September 2021, the paper was retracted from the journal that published it — the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
On Friday, NPR reported the insurance company that provided data for the 2012 study said its own review found that the data had been “manipulated inappropriately” after it was handed over and before the paper was published. Gino’s coauthor and Duke University professor Dan Ariely, who acquired that data, according to the NPR report, denied falsifying it.
“To be explicitly clear, I have never manipulated or misrepresented data in any of my work and have never knowingly participated in any project where the data or conclusions were manipulated or mispresented,” Ariely said Friday in a statement to the Globe.
Concerns about Gino’s scholarship grew as Data Colada’s writers continued publishing their four-part series.
Their second and third posts alleged data fabrication in two papers Gino worked on that were published in the journal Psychological Science: a 2015 study finding that experiencing inauthenticity leads people to feel more “immoral and impure” and a 2014 article titled, “Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity.”
Patricia J. Bauer, editor in chief of Psychological Science, said earlier this month that the journal retracted both articles on July 6 after Harvard Business School told her an investigation by an independent forensic firm had “revealed discrepancies” between the published data and original data.
In the final post of their blog series, Data Colada’s professors reported evidence of data tampering in a 2020 article about how specific mind-sets affect people’s feelings about networking coauthored by Gino and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Rose Sokol, the publisher of journals and books at the American Psychological Association, wrote in an emailed statement that a retraction of the 2020 article is “slated to be published in the September issue” of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“At this time, we believe this to be an isolated incident,” Sokol wrote. “However, we continue to be in touch with the institution and if we have reason to consider retracting other articles, we will take appropriate steps.”
Oransky, of Retraction Watch, lauded Data Colada’s authors for their efforts to uncover research fraud, adding that “established players” in academia historically have neglected and even actively fought against such initiatives.
“The world needs to pay more attention to, and frankly appreciate more, the sleuths,” he said, “who are really doing the work to clean up science.”
Alex Koller can be reached at alex.koller@globe.com.