Harvard professor who researches ‘honesty’ accused of fraud

The fraud came to light after a 2012 paper that Gino co-authored for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was retracted by the journal for falsifying results.

The paper abstract read, “Many written forms required by businesses and governments rely on honest reporting. Proof of honest intent is typically provided through signature at the end of, eg, tax returns or insurance policy forms. Still, people sometimes cheat to advance their financial self-interests at great costs to society. We test an easy-to-implement method to discourage dishonesty: signing at the beginning rather than at the end of a self-report, thereby reversing the order of the current practice”.

The faulty paper found that people who signed “truthfulness declarations” at the top of tax and insurance forms were more honest than those who signed them at the bottom of the page.

On 16 June, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Max Bazerman, co-author of the 2012 study alongside Gino, said that Harvard informed him that it believed one of the studies overseen by Gino had falsified results.

Harvard sent a 14-page memo to Bazerman but he denied involvement in any academic fraud or database tampering.

The Guardian citing the DataColoda blog reported that three behavioral science academics published a four-part series of posts that explained the evidence of alleged fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Gino.

“If the fraud was carried out by collecting real data on Qualtrics and then altering the downloaded data files, as is likely to be the case for three of these papers, then the original Qualtrics files would provide airtight evidence of fraud,” one of the scholars told The Guardian.

According to Gino’s Harvard profile, she is on administrative leave at present.

Updated: 26 Jun 2023, 02:07 PM IST