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A highly regarded Behavioral Economics article on Self-Assessment Fraud Prevention, co-authored by two Harvard Business School professors, has been submitted for retraction following allegations that the data itself is fraudulent and fabricated.
The article, co-authored by Business School professors Max H. Bazerman and Francesca Gino, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America in 2012. The study found that people were less likely to lie if they signed a statement of honesty at the beginning rather than at the end of a form. Its findings have been used widely by insurance companies, business executives and government agencies to tackle fraudulent reporting behavior.
On August 17, Data Colada, a quantitative analysis blog, published an article claiming to have found “very strong evidence” that the data from one of the field studies is fraudulent. Co-authors Uri Simonsohn, Leif D. Nelson, and Joseph P. Simmons urged journals to require publication of the data as well as the results of the studies.
Four of the five co-authors said BuzzFeed News in August that they were not involved in data collection for this experiment, which was being conducted by an insurance company on its clients.
The only researcher who was in contact with the insurance company, Duke School of Business professor Dan Ariely, wrote in a statement posted to Data Colada that he had not fabricated the data and “was not involved. in data collection, data entry or merging data with insurance database information for confidentiality reasons.
The integrity of Ariely’s research has already been called into question on at least two occasions, according to Buzzfeed News. In 2008, he published research claiming that asking candidates to remember the Ten Commandments before an exam reduced cheating, but outside researchers failed to replicate the results. The editors recently added a note to a study he did in 2004 when he failed to provide the journal with accompanying data.
Ariely told BuzzFeed News that her contacts at the insurer – The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., an insurance and investment firm – had no recollection of the origins of the data file or its analysis. .
In an email to The Crimson, Boston University professor Nina Mažar, co-author of the study, wrote that the fieldwork had been completed years before her involvement in January 2011. Mažar wrote that Ariely made the field study results public in 2009, and she received the data in an email from Ariely in February 2011.
“Like the other three co-authors, I had no dossier or concrete information on the insurance field study before the study by Shu et al. collaboration, ”she wrote.
In 2020, the five researchers and two additional co-authors published an article in PNAS refuting their own findings and noting their inability to replicate the results of the 2012 article. They published their original data with the article.
In a statement to The Crimson provided by Business School spokesperson Brian C. Kenny on behalf of Bazerman and Gino, the faculty expressed their appreciation for Data Colada’s analysis.
“We are grateful to Simonsohn, Simmons and Nelson for their efforts to improve social science research and the careful analyzes they undertook of our PNAS 2012 article,” they wrote.
Although he admitted to the newspaper’s flaws, Ariely told BuzzFeed News he still believes the “principle” behind the 2012 newspaper was correct.
“My understanding is that the data file that the Data Colada post reviewed is the same one that all of us co-authors had available since long before our first submission to PNAS in June 2012,” Mažar wrote in an email to The Crimson. “Looking back, the five of us should have done a better job looking at it.”
Bazerman and Gino, along with first author Lisa L. Shu, sent a letter to PNAS editors requesting the removal of the 2012 article on July 22.
Prashant Nair, a representative for the PNAS press office, declined to comment on when the 2012 article will be retracted and whether the newspaper will take action to prevent fraudulent studies in the future.
“We are aware of the situation and are in communication with the authors,” Nair wrote in an email.
—Editor Carrie Hsu can be contacted at [email protected].
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