The Review: A dishonesty expert is accused of fraud. She's not the first one.

A conversation with Stephanie Lee about lies, damn lies, and statistics. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. A couple of weeks ago, Stephanie M. Lee [wrote]( in our pages about a Harvard Business School researcher named Francesca Gino, a well-known behavioral scientist — one of her major subjects is dishonesty — who has been accused of research misconduct and taken administrative leave. Last week, Lee and Nell Gluckman [followed up]( describing some of the broader implications of Gino’s case. I talked with Lee about academic dishonesty, perverse incentives, and the glittering rewards of the corporate lecture circuit. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. One reason this story resonates is surely the rubbernecking we all experience, and maybe a general interest in cheaters and frauds, especially cheaters and frauds in technical and high-prestige fields. It’s the Bankman-Fried or Elizabeth Holmes phenomenon. It has a certain entertainment value. What are the bigger stakes? Gino is a tenured professor at Harvard Business School; she has published a popular book and done studies with leading scholars at other top business schools. She’s a leader in the field. She edited a top journal about organizational behavior, and she is widely in demand on the speaking and consulting circuit. She is in many ways the epitome of what a star scholar looks like. So the possibility that at least some of her research is fabricated has sent shock waves through the community because she has worked with so many people. She’s had 150 or so collaborators, and she’s published more than 130 studies since 2007. We don’t know how big the fallout will be, but it could be great. The behavioral sciences over the last decade have been undergoing a replication crisis. Many studies about psychology and human behavior are just not replicating. There are a lot of different reasons for that. It’s usually not outright fraud. It’s usually statistical tampering of various kinds. Making up things is thought to be a lot more rare. But what the crisis has shown is that the incentives in academe encourage a lot of studies be published very quickly with headline-grabbing results to get tenure, to get funding, and so on. And that means the public and other scholars will put less trust in this research. It encourages researchers to learn sloppy behaviors or even fraudulent behaviors. So one reason this is touching such a nerve is that so many people coming up through the ranks have been encouraged to try to model their careers after Gino’s. Gino, as you write, had speaking and consulting gigs at “some of the world’s biggest companies and institutions — Bacardi, Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Disney, Goldman Sachs, Honeywell, Novartis, Procter & Gamble,” plus all three branches of the military. She was presumably making an enormous amount of money from all this — a booking-agency website [lists]( her fee range as between $50,000 and $100,000. Does that create a bad incentive? Should there be constraints on the extent to which an academic can profit from or participate in this corporate lecture circuit? If you did it, you would have to extend the policy beyond just business schools. You’d have to say to biology professors that you can only make so much money consulting for a pharmaceutical company, and so on. SPONSOR CONTENT | American University [The Key to Success after Graduation: Experiential Learning]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. My understanding is that government organizations like the NIH do have rules like that. If you’re a Ph.D. biologist who works for the NIH and you go to Harvard to give a talk about, say, grant-writing, the government is so concerned about the possibility of corruption or the appearance of corruption that they pay for everything: the train ride, the hotel. You can’t let Harvard take you out to dinner. There are some constraints on researchers working for the government. Should Harvard have similar constraints? In general, there are plenty of people who think industry and academe are too cozy, and they get away with working together a little bit too much — or a lot too much. So, broadly, I think that’s definitely a dynamic of potential concern. And for universities it’s probably always a balancing act: If we’re too restrictive, will this expert work for the company outright and we won’t have them at all? I would say in general there is an ethical contradiction in becoming such a fixture on the speaking circuit: You’re ostensibly hired to do these gigs because of your expertise, but there is a line that is perhaps crossed at some point where you become the product, and the research you’re speaking about becomes sort of incidental. Or it can’t be produced nearly quickly enough to keep up with the number of gigs you are doing. So I think there might be a point at which the demand for your expertise perhaps comes at the expense of building the expertise. One really eye-popping scandal in behavioral psychology was the [Amy Cuddy]( power-pose thing. ([Efforts to replicate]( Cuddy’s 2010 [“power-pose” research]( have largely struggled to find that power-posing affects people’s hormones or behavior, as originally reported, though they do indicate that subjective feelings of power increase.) She was at Harvard Business School. Then there was Brian Wansink, a researcher of eating behavior who, as you [reported]( in BuzzFeed, “turned shoddy data into headline-friendly eating lessons.” Wansink was a faculty member in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, which is part of Cornell’s SC Johnson College of Business. And there was [Dan Ariely]( who is at the business school at Duke. For a 2012 study, data that he said he procured from an insurance company later turned out to be fraudulent, though he has denied fabricating it. Are business schools attracting scholars more inclined to BS? I don’t really know how big our sample size is for business-school fraud. If you read [Retraction Watch]( there are lots of examples of studies that don’t replicate, of people making up data, across fields, and not just in business schools. A Harvard data-falsification case that has gotten invoked quite a bit in relation to this is [Marc Hauser](. He was a biologist at Harvard who was found to be fabricating data in 2010. Gino wrote a book subtitled Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life. Ariely wrote a book about dishonesty — he is a researcher of dishonesty who has himself been accused of dishonesty. Amy Cuddy wrote about power-posing, and there’s a sort of metaphorical relationship between power-posing as a specious way to make yourself strong and research misconduct as a specious way of building an academic career. It seems to me like there’s more here than coincidence. I won’t profess to know the psychology of these people. In general, you might think that researchers who study dishonesty, of all people, should know the best when it comes to these things! But people of all kinds can make decisions for bad reasons. I think if the particular irony of these stories gets people interested in deeper issues of perverse incentives in academe, safeguards that should be in place to prevent future cases like them, they’re worth reporting on. These kinds of behaviors unfortunately happen a lot in a lot of different fields, and most of them aren’t paid any attention to. UPCOMING PROGRAM [The Chronicle's Bootcamp for Future Faculty Leaders] [Join us in September]( for a professional development program tailored to the needs of midcareer faculty. Experienced academic leaders and faculty members will provide insights on the diverse professional paths that might be taken by faculty members in this one-day virtual program. 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