The Harvard fake data scandal revolves around Francessca Gino as people are wondering if she has been fired in the nidst of the brouhaha.
The journal Psychological Science retracted two studies by Gino last week in public announcements, citing the advice of the Research Integrity Office at Harvard Business School (HBS).
In both cases, the journal said an independent forensic firm engaged by HBS had discovered ‘discrepancies’ between the published data sets and earlier data sets from Gino’s behavioral experiments.
Separately, Harvard has requested that the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology withdraw a third study by Gino, and the journal’s publishers plan to retract the article in the September issue, the Financial Times reported.
Three scientists accused all three papers—along with a fourth one co-authored by Gino and earlier retracted in 2021—of utilizing fabricated data in a series of blog entries on Data Colada. A day after the Chronicle of Higher Education revealed on June 16 that Gino had been placed on administrative leave due to a Harvard internal review regarding the reliability of her research, the trio shared their concerns.
On Wednesday evening, Gino did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and a representative from Harvard Business School declined to comment. The 2015 study, “The Moral Virtue of Authenticity: How Inauthenticity Produces Feelings of Immorality and Impurity,” and the 2014 study, “Evil Genius?,” were the two that Psychological Science just retracted. How Being Dishonest Can Boost Creativity.
Is Francessca Gino fired?
No, Francesca Gino has not been fired. The professor is rather on administrative leave, after explosive allegations emerged challenging the credibility of her research.
Why Connect? was the title of the 2020 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper that will be retracted. Networking with a promotion or prevention focus has moral repercussions.
In five independent lab studies for the study titled “Evil Genius,” human volunteers were given the option to act dishonestly by inflating their performance on a variety of activities.
They were then evaluated on creative tasks. According to the original abstract, the article was supposed to show that “behaving dishonestly leads to greater creativity in subsequent tasks.”
‘An investigation by an independent forensic firm engaged by the HBS revealed discrepancies between the published data sets and what HBS referred to as the earliest known versions of the data, which were retrieved from the first author’s research records,’ the paper’s retraction notice said.
However, data scientists Uri Simonsohn, Joseph Simmons, and Leif Nelson allege that the data fabrication in the study was deeper than originally suspected, and also implicated Gino.
‘That’s right: Two different people independently faked data for two different studies in a paper about dishonesty,’ the trio wrote on their blog DataColada, where they published the new evidence supporting their allegations.
