Shocking Harvard Fraud Exposed – Can We Trust Behavioral Science Anymore?

Claims that fraudulent data was used in papers co-authored by a leading Harvard Business School ethicist have fueled a growing controversy over the validity of behavioral science, the findings of which are routinely taught in schools. business and are applied within companies.

While the professor has yet to respond to the details of the claims, the episode it is the latest blow to a field that has risen to prominence in the last 15 years and whose findings in areas such as decision making and team building are widely put into practice.

Companies from Coca-Cola to JPMorgan Chase have executives dedicated to behavior science, while governments around the world have also adopted their findings. But now well-known principles in the field, such as the “push theory,” are being questioned.

He harvard The episode “is the number one topic in business school circles,” said André Spicer, executive dean of London’s Bayes Business School. “There has been a full-scale replication crisis in psychology: many of the results are not reproducible and some of the underlying data was found to be false.”

Academic bloggers have claimed in recent weeks that there is “evidence of fraud in four academic papers” published by Francesca Gino, a Harvard business administration professor.

Gino, who is on administrative leave, has said on Linkedin that it continues “evaluating these allegations and evaluating my options. . . I want to assure you that I take them seriously and that they will be addressed.” Harvard has not commented.

Academics who manage the Data Colada Blog, which investigates the evidence behind behavioral science studies, disputed the research Gino co-authored, suggesting that people are more likely to report their income honestly when they sign an “honesty statement” at the outset, rather than at the end of your tax return. . That study had already been retracted, but Data Colada said it had found new signs of manipulation in the underlying data.

follow-up posts They have questioned research findings that acting dishonestly led to increased creativity and that there were links between feeling authentic and behaving morally.

While the claims are a new blow to behavioral science, it’s not the first time its findings have come into question since Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein brought the field to popular attention with their 2008 book. Push.

The exposure of fabricated data in dozens of research projects overseen by Dutch researcher Diederik Stapel a decade ago raised questions about the importance of “social grooming,” the idea that cues can change people’s behavior. Stapel’s downfall led to Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, father of behavioral research, citing prime in his cult book. Thinking, Fast and Slow – to warn that he saw “a looming train wreck” in the countryside.

Last year, a paper led by Maximilian Maier at University College London even suggested that adequately correcting for “publication bias,” the tendency among researchers to withhold studies that fail to uncover significant findings, left “no evidence of effectiveness.” of the pushes”.

That cast a shadow over the use of behavioral science by government-linked “push units” such as the UK’s Behavioral Insights Team, which spun off into a company in 2014, and the Office of Behavioral Sciences. US Assessment

However, David Halpern, now president of BIT, countered that publication bias is not unique to the field. He said he and his colleagues use much larger scale, more representative and robust evidence than academic research.

Halpern argued that behavioral research can help implement government budgets effectively. “The dirty secret of most governments and organizations is that they spend a lot of money, but they have no idea if they are spending it in ways that make things better.”

The academics point out that testing the results of others is part of normal scientific practice. The difference with behavioral science is that initial results that have not yet been replicated are often quickly recycled in sensational headlines, popular self-help books, and business practices.

“Scientists should be better at pointing out when non-scientists over-exaggerate these things and extrapolate, but they worry that if they do this they will ruin the positive trend. [towards their field]said Pelle Guldborg Hansen, executive director of iNudgeyou, a center for applied behavioral research.

Many consultancies have sprung up to meet the corporate demand for behavioral insights. “What I found was that almost everyone who had read Push she had a license to establish herself as a behavioral scientist,” said Nuala Walsh, who formed the Global Association of Applied Behavioral Scientists in 2020 to try to set some standards.

According to the academics, ways to make the field more rigorous could include more sharing of underlying data; simplification of large multilevel research teams; and greater caution about studies based on “laboratory” experiments. They have also suggested “pre-registration” of research hypotheses to prevent researchers from choosing to pursue conclusions once the data is collected.

Hans Ijzerman of the University of Grenoble and other researchers warned against overusing behavioral research to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. They highlighted the widespread use of “weird” study participants, “mainly students. . . drawn from populations found in Western (mainly US), educated, industrialized, wealthy, and democratic societies.”

“We need to get to a place where we don’t get excited about someone finding a quirk in human behavior,” said Grace Lordan, an associate professor of behavioral sciences at the London School of Economics. “We just have to emphasize that this is a very novel result and needs to be replicated.”

Usha Haley, a professor at Wichita State University, cautioned against the desire of behavioral and managerial studies specialists to seek definitive rules and laws of the type most common in the natural sciences.

“The latest scandal. . . it is a symptom of a broader problem spanning more than two decades related to the generation of knowledge in the social sciences and the ‘envy of physics’ that characterizes business and the economy,” he said.

Proponents of behavioral science say that recent controversies are exceptions, and that the field can be a valuable corrective to unfounded predictions about behavior.

For example, at the start of the pandemic in 2020, UK health officials argued against the rapid imposition of infection control measures, such as lockdowns, because people would be reluctant to conform for any significant period, thereby It’s known as “behavioral fatigue.” However, nearly 700 scientists publicly stated that there was no basis for such claims in the research. The high levels of compliance with confinement rules seemed to confirm their skepticism about the concept of “fatigue”.

There is still good evidence for concepts such as loss aversion bias (that people’s pain at losing something is proportionately greater than the happiness they derive from gains) and status quo bias, in which people show a Preference for the existing situation over the alternatives.

Evidence-based applications in the field include “opt-out” policies that encourage pension contributions and organ donations.

Katy Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, said: “I’ve had more conversations in the last week about how we can make our science more robust and fraud-proof than last year. So I anticipate very positive side effects of these revelations for those of us who study the push.”

Meanwhile, waves of allegations against Gino’s work are hitting co-authors, researchers, students, and colleagues. As he wrote in his recent LinkedIn post, “there will be more to come on all of this.”