Honestly?

I don't know Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. I've never met her. But I've read her work, and heard her presentations. As part of my freelance writing work - now in the rearview mirror - I've written about and referenced these second-hand encounters for a client of long-standing. (Just did a quick check of my old documents, and her name comes up in quite a few of those old documents.) 

I don't really remember much about what she had to say, but I do remember enjoying reading her work and hearing her presentations. I remember I found them interesting.

Maybe too interesting. 

Over the past two decades, dozens of behavioral scientists have risen to prominence pointing out the power of small interventions to improve well-being.

The scientists said they had found that automatically enrolling people in organ donor programs would lead to higher rates of donation, and that moving healthy foods like fruit closer to the front of a buffet line would result in healthier eating.

Many of these findings have attracted skepticism as other scholars showed that their effects were smaller than initially claimed, or that they had little impact at all. But in recent days, the field may have sustained its most serious blow yet: accusations that a prominent behavioral scientist fabricated results in multiple studies, including at least one purporting to show how to elicit honest behavior.

The scholar, Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, has been a co-author of dozens of papers in peer-reviewed journals on such topics as how rituals like silently counting to 10 before deciding what to eat can increase the likelihood of choosing healthier food, and how networking can make professionals feel dirty.

...Questions about her work surfaced in an article on June 16 in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a 2012 paper written by Dr. Gino and four colleagues. One of Dr. Gino’s co-authors — Max H. Bazerman, also of Harvard Business School — told The Chronicle that the university had informed him that a study overseen by Dr. Gino for the paper appeared to include fabricated results. (Source: NY Times)

Several other papers on which Gino collaborated are under suspicion for phony results. 

 Yowza!

I understand the temptation to fudge the data to produce the results you're looking for. Especially if you honestly believe that the results you're looking for are right.

(I'm reminded of something my husband was told by his dissertation director when Jim - whose thesis was a model of Federal Reserve behavior in the 1960's (it's okay to yawn) - reported that he was having trouble his model. Jim's esteemed economist mentor told him that there was nothing wrong with Jim's model. The problem was with reality.) 

Gino is apparently not alone when it comes to goosing data sets in the social sciences.

One category of questionable methods, said Colin Camerer, a behavioral economist at the California Institute of Technology, is p-hacking — for example, testing a series of arbitrary data combinations until the researcher arrives at an inflated statistical correlation.

(I'm reminded of a just-out-of-business-school job I had helping build forecasting models for corporate America so that corporate America could predict demand. Or something. Anyway, when we were doing multi-variate analysis (it's okay to yawn), us amateur/semi-pro/professional modelers were all encouraged to throw in extraneous variables to the equations so that it made the models look better. This was called "fit pumping." We tried not to throw in variables that were completely preposterous. Mostly, anyway. I remember a colleague - and I can't really remember, but that colleague may have been me -  coming up with some sort of correlation between swimming pool installations and telephone line uninstalls. I was much happier to work on time series analysis, where you just looked at the one core data set and didn't bring in any explanatory/supposedly causal variables. No fit pumping involved.)

So I get the temptation to fudge. 

But talk about high risk behavior when you're a professor at the Harvard Business School, and are collaborating with colleagues at similarly high-visibility and prestigious schools. What was she thinking? That she'd never get caught?

And the fact that her research was around the topic of honesty, a topic Gino is considered an expert in. 

Several of the papers she worked on and provided data for have been withdrawn. Among them “Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity” and “The Moral Virtue of Authenticity: How Inauthenticity Produces Feelings of Immorality and Impurity."

Does all this prove her thesis that "dishonesty can lead to greater creativity?"

Gino is now on administrative leave from Harvard, and I'm guessing that, if the allegations are proven true, she'll be fired. She's in her mid-forties, and this sure seems like a career killer to me, at least when it comes to building a career in the upper echelons of academia. 

Honestly, you can't make this stuff up.