Shockwaves are moving throughout the behavioral science community after distinguished Professor Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School was recently accused of falsifying data in multiple studies.
Calling the situation a “Clusterfake,” on June 17 a trio of professors published “Part 1” of the multiple allegations of fraud in papers spanning over a decade after examining studies co-authored by Gino, author of the 2018 book “Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life.”
Professors Joseph Simmons, Uri Simonsohn and Leif Nelson of University of Pennsylvania, Escade Business School in Spain, and University of California, Berkeley, respectively, accused Gino of the fraud on their blog Data Colada.
“Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud,” they wrote, stating they shared their concerns with Harvard Business School.
Notably, a famous article discussing dishonesty was found to contain fabrications, they wrote.
Gino is on administrative leave from Harvard, according to her faculty bio. She did not respond to a request for comment from The College Fix. Simmons and Nelson did not respond to The College Fix’s requests for comment.
Harvard media relations did not respond to The College Fix for a comment on the employment of Gino and the review of her studies.
The New York Times reported a phone call with a man who identified as Gino’s husband saying “It’s obviously something that is very sensitive that we can’t speak to now.”
Gino’s paper discussing dishonesty has since been retracted. “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end” had been published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2012.
The study was run at the University of North Carolina in 2010, where Gino was a professor before joining Harvard; she was the only author involved in collecting and analyzing data for it, the trio reported.
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