“Here’s the Unsealed Report Showing How Harvard Concluded That a Dishonesty Expert Committed Misconduct”

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Stephanie Lee has the story:

Harvard Business School’s investigative report into the behavioral scientist Francesca Gino was made public this week, revealing extensive details about how the institution came to conclude that the professor committed research misconduct in a series of papers.

The nearly 1,300-page document was unsealed after a Tuesday ruling from a Massachusetts judge, the latest development in a $25 million lawsuit that Gino filed last year against Harvard University, the dean of the Harvard Business School, and three business-school professors who first notified Harvard of red flags in four of her papers. All four have been retracted. . . .

According to the report, dated March 7, 2023, one of Gino’s main defenses to the committee was that the perpetrator could have been someone else — someone who had access to her computer, online data-storage account, and/or data files.

Gino named a professor as the most likely suspect. The person’s name was redacted in the released report, but she is identified as a female professor who was a co-author of Gino’s on a 2012 now-retracted paper about inducing honest behavior by prompting people to sign a form at the top rather than at the bottom. . . . Allegedly, she was “angry” at Gino for “not sufficiently defending” one of their collaborators “against perceived attacks by another co-author” concerning an experiment in the paper.

But the investigation committee did not see a “plausible motive” for the other professor to have committed misconduct by falsifying Gino’s data. “Gino presented no evidence of any data falsification actions by actors with malicious intentions,” the committee wrote. . . .

Gino’s other main defense, according to the report: Honest errors may have occurred when her research assistants were coding, checking, or cleaning the data. . . .

Again, however, the committee wrote that “she does not provide any evidence of [research assistant] error that we find persuasive in explaining the major anomalies and discrepancies.”

The full report is at the link.

Some background is here, also here, and some reanalyses of the data are linked here.

Now we just have to get to the bottom of the story about the shredder and the 80-pound rock and we’ll pretty much have settled all the open questions in this field.

We’ve already determined that the “burly coolie” story and the “smallish town” story never happened.

It’s good we have dishonesty experts. There’s a lot of dishonesty out there.

24 thoughts on ““Here’s the Unsealed Report Showing How Harvard Concluded That a Dishonesty Expert Committed Misconduct””

  1. Agreed there’s a lot of dishonestly out there, and this is likely such a case. That said I’ll be very interested to see how this case turns out. Only read about Harvard’s “new policy” on her website, francesca-v-harvard, but it sounds rather limiting, i.e. “The new policy limited the number of advisors I could talk to—I was allowed just two.” Of course, one was a lawyer, who wouldn’t be much help with any statistical/forensic analysis.

    Also, hate that Data Colada got sued here, but I think she has a point that they too changed their process by not sharing their concerns with her or giving her a chance to respond to them.

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    • Josh:

      Without making any claims about who was being dishonest in this case, it seems 100% clear that there was dishonesty here. Gino did not say there was no dishonesty, she just said that someone else was the perpetrator. Either way, somebody did it.

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    • @Josh
      Have Data Colada really changed their process? I would argue that they adapted their process to a new situation… But this question is beside the point for two reasons:
      (1) The procedure does not matter unless it discriminated against Ms Gino. So Ms Gino’s legal team will have to prove that they discriminated against her… on the basis of something. Having read the court filings, they have not put too much effort into providing evidence in this direction. The filings concentrate on the allegations against Harvard.
      (2) Data Colada claim that their work was an opinion. If this is true, the case against them will be dismissed, because an opinion cannot be defamatory, according to established case law. Data Colada’s legal team has filed a motion to dismiss the case against themselves on these grounds. As far as I can tell from the court documents, no hearing has yet been scheduled regarding this issue.

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      • Thanks for the feedback, Raphael. By “she has a point,” I don’t mean she has ground to sue them. I too hope this is summarily dismissed.

        How do you see this as a new situations though? Data Colada have exposed multiple cases of data fabrication including the “Signing at the Top” paper where Dan Ariely seems to have provided fabricated data and Gino was also a co-author. There they follow their normal protocol of asking all the authors for feedback and posting it along with their report. https://datacolada.org/98

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        • @Josh
          You got me there! Unfortunately, I was unable to track down my source. It may have been in the court filings, but I cannot go back through them to find the source. The story I remember is that they approached Harvard and Harvard replied “Thank you, we will take it up, please let us do our work and do not undermine our investigation by going public yet”. The publication of their findings came after Harvard had completed its investigation (in their first Cluster Fake post they mentioned that Harvard had produced a confidential 1200 page report). They therefore had good reason to believe that Ms Gino had ample opportunity to be heard. Whether the “good reasons” are really that good remains to be seen in the second part of the trial, the judgement on the investigation of Harvard’s investigation.

  2. One thing that’s especially odd about the defense is Gino’s claim that someone modified the data in the Qualitrics account. While you can make edits to data in Qualtrics, those edits sit on top of the data. You can always get the original Qualtrics data without the edits. On page 22 of the report PDF, the investigators seem to have checked her Qualtrics account and found:
    “This analysis showed that some data in the OSF dataset do not appear in either of the two Qualtrics datasets for this study, that those data strongly support the hypothesized and reported results, and that some data in the two Qualtrics datasets do not appear in the OSF dataset. In addition, when the analyses reported in the published paper were run on the data from Professor Gino’s Qualtrics account, the key result that participants in the pro-attitudinal condition expressed significantly lower desirability of cleaning products – failed to replicate.”

    More details about the analysis are on page 642 of the report.

    The full 1282 page monstrosity is here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.259933/gov.uscourts.mad.259933.20.5_1.pdf

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    • While on this topic — if you don’t mind sharing (if Andrew is listening), has this blog been threatened with lawsuits?

      I have been following this to see how it goes (you can visit Steve’s link minus the PDF at the end to see all of the back and forth on the court listener website). Writing critiques on my personal blog (not dissimilar to what Data Colada did), has given me pause whether it is worth the risk or not.

      I think the ACLU Amici Curiae in the case is worth a read for folks on this blog, https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.259933/gov.uscourts.mad.259933.46.1_2.pdf. But that is not much comfort if I have to get a second mortgage to pay for my defense should something like that occur.

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      • “has this blog been threatened with lawsuits?”

        I have predicted that not only will Gino’s lawsuit be dismissed, but also that she will be penalized under SLAPP. So that is going to hurt, since her pockets can’t be all that deep.

        A few notes:

        Gino has not presented any direct defense against the claims of fraud made against her. Back in November, she wrote some hastily prepared stuff consisting of obfuscation and protestations that the original data is unavailable. That stuff is here (highlighted in blue):

        https://www.francesca-v-harvard.org/innocence

        The essays highlighted in blue have remain unchanged since November, meaning that the substantive defenses against the allegations that she promised simply never materialized.

        The coauthor accused of messing with her data is almost certainly Nina Mazar, who was also embroiled in the Dan Ariely scandal. I feel that Mazar has comported herself well throughout – she refused to endorse obfuscations by both of the accused – unlike some other Gino coauthors who seem to only want to circle the wagons. I’m not a lawyer, but ironically it seems that Mazar would have a pretty solid case of defamation under the American rules. In other words, a far stronger case than Gino’s.

        If there is any lingering credibility to all the personal attestations about Gino’s moral character, that should end with her attempt to throw her junior co-author under the proverbial bus.

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    • I suspect this issue, with varying degrees of misconduct, is even more widespread among researchers with a lower profile, primarily because the likelihood of their work being scrutinized closely is lower, leading to less exposure of potential issues.There’s just too much paper production and not enough quality control.

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    • Shavran:

      Gino was a media darling HBS professor; essentially a celebrity among intelligentsia. If a random idiot nobody like me wrote fraudulent papers I’d probably never be found out because my research would not have nearly the same level of publicity (and by extension, scrutiny) as Gino’s. It’s essentially a matter of sampling bias, but one that Gino helped cultivate.

      Even among higher profile cases of misconduct, I still think Gino’s case is somewhat more unique. She has more clear-cut allegations against her than Ariely, for example. And something like Matthew Walker’s attempts to manipulate a graph, while terrible, probably doesn’t invoke the same ire as out-right falsifying data, even though they’re essentially the same crime.

      I’m not saying it’s *fair*. Ideally every criminal could be found out and punished in equal measure. But it stands to reason that those that draw attention to themselves are more likely to be caught.

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  5. I looked at parts of the full report. For technical material, it mostly seemed to be a very deep dive into the procedural details of what’s already been debated in public. I felt like I was reading an elaborate version of a TV scene along these lines:

    Investigator: “There’s all these discrepancies. If not you, then who?”
    Suspect: “I’m innocent! It was that hussy who hates me!”
    Investigator: “How she’d do it then? It was YOU who had motive, means, and opportunity.”
    Suspect: “Look at all these people who say I’d never do something like that! And it was so crude and obvious!”
    Investigator: “That’s not responsive”. Book ’em, Danno.

    Yet the one about the repeated “Harvard” data items is very strange. It does seem extraordinarily crude to be deliberate fabrication. But if it was some honest error somehow, having something so clearly awry is not an encouraging alternative.

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  6. I keep puzzling over why some really consequential data falsifications in neuroscience by males do not generate the publicity that the Harvard/Gino/DataColada/Behavioral Science does. For example, at Stanford, its president was forced to resign but he is still a member of the faculty; at Johns Hopkins, a Nobel Prize winner who is implicated in many instances of photoshop manipulation is still in good standing.
    For an absolutely human side of Gino, here is a very short video, taken just before the allegations started flying, of Gino in her backyard shooting hoops with her family

    https://www.instagram.com/p/CsykXWdupge/
    Is this video relevant to the controversy? You be the judge.

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    • In both cases you mention (Stanford and Johns Hopkins) the researchers ran large groups and could get away with the defense that, although they should have been more careful with assessing results from the lab, the image manipulations were done by lab members and they were regrettably unaware of this. That seems to be an acceptable defence and is somwhat different from the case in the top post.

      I haven’t followed these cases in detail but it seems appropriate that the work of the junior researchers associated with papers with fraudulent images from these labs should be scruitinised so that dodgy practices don’t propagate through subsequent generations of researchers.

      I can’t think of any large labs run by women scientists that have had image manipulation issues, but large labs run by women is probably already a smallish sample, and one might imagine (warning: stereotype alert!) that these are more likely to be invested in maintaining a close involvement with day to day running of their labs.

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  7. “Gino’s defense isn’t that the dog ate her homework, it is that a whole pack of neighborhood dogs came and took turns eating her homework.”

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