Francesca said Nina did the dirty and now all hell breaks loose.

Nina is a product of Atelier Ariely … so…

Blame everyone else for the falsification, and sue the pants off the whistle blowers – Harvard’s Francesca Gino, having been outed, plays the cards she’s got.

But once it turns legal, once you make it legal, you run the risk that a judge will decide Harvard’s investigation into your apparently quite extensive research misconduct (and hey take a look at one of your co-authors, Dan Ariely!) should go public.

So we can all read your insistence, in interviews with Harvard’s investigators, that a bunch of incompetent underlings did it; or, if that doesn’t work, a malicious co-author decided to sabotage you.

If you want to get ahead.

Like Donald Trump, one of these two has turned around and sued everyone in sight (for massive damages) for having had the gall to point out fraudulence.

Let’s see what Dan Ariely does. He’ll probably sue too. I mean, go for it. Double down. What the hell.

Background.

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This dude, a notorious, long-term fraudster, has finally been dumped by Florida State. Took them ages.

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The lesson from all of this (and so much more) is: BEWARE SOCIAL SCIENTISTS BEARING STUDIES. But no one ever seems to learn it.

Via her reader, Seelye, UD learns of the latest iteration of way-bogus psychology scholarship.

She’s named Francesca Giro and she has a really cool website.

We’re all looking for easy steps to a better brighter you, and Happiness + Efficiency experts oblige us with studies showing that, like, thinking of eating meat makes you more boorish and less social. (I read this particular result, from world-famous Diederik Stapel, to Mr UD, who laughed merrily.) H+E experts (Dan Ariely – a co-author of Francesca Giro’s! – Marc Hauser – who shares with Giro the Harvard affiliation – Jens Förster, etc.) are always flooring us with amazing whodathunkits, and we fall for this shit every single time cuz it comes out of Harvard or cuz we just want to believe it or because we’re thrilled by the weird.

But Uri Simonsohn (a name known to readers of this blog) doesn’t fall for it. At all. He finds discipline-destroying lies enraging, and sets about, with a couple of colleagues, to keep the field reasonably clean through exposure of research fraud. The miscreants make stuff up and manipulate numbers in order to keep generating attention-grabbing amazements and giving amazing TED talks re: the amazements and Uri’s right behind them, running the numbers.

How can we protect ourselves from marauding high-profile psych frauds?

Step One: If something sounds bogus, it’s probably bogus.

Beset by accusations of research fraud, Duke professor and public intellectual Dan Ariely has held his ground, admitting a bit of sloppiness but nothing like making up data. Yet an analysis of details in a 2012 paper he wrote about honesty (!) suggests that he may well be responsible for bogus numbers in one of his influential psychological experiments.

And this is not the first time questions have been raised about Ariely’s research in particular. In a famous 2008 study, he claimed that prompting people to recall the Ten Commandments before a test cuts down on cheating, but an outside team later failed to replicate the effect. An editor’s note was added to a 2004 study of his last month when other researchers raised concerns about statistical discrepancies, and Ariely did not have the original data to cross-check against. And in 2010, Ariely told NPR that dentists often disagree on whether X-rays show a cavity, citing Delta Dental insurance as his source. He later walked back that claim when the company said it could not have shared that information with him because it did not collect it.

Ariely is also up against his field’s now-notorious “replication crisis” — a nice way of saying that SCADS of psychological experimental results sure look a whole lot like bullshit. Go here for details.

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A photograph in this article features Ariely hanging with Jonah Lehrer at a 2008 science festival. Much like Ariely, Lehrer was a much-celebrated brainiac with frenetic entrepreneurial energy until he went pffff.

Jonah Lehrer’s 2012 book Imagine: How Creativity Works was pulled from shelves after it was demonstrated to contain fabricated quotes purportedly from Bob Dylan and WH Auden. He subsequently admitted to plagiarising the work of others in his blogposts, while critics noted apparent plagiarism and disregard for facts throughout his published work.

UD’s got nothing against operators. America is Land O’ Operators. He’s an operator/He’s a real player, as Fountains of Wayne puts it, and we got ’em growing on trees around here. But don’t believe anything they tell you.

An honest appraisal of conflict of interest, and a suggestion for one thing that might mitigate it.

First point: Conflict of interest is virtually unavoidable, for social and psychological reasons. The author recalls his dealings, as a young researcher, with a medical device manufacturer.

As we developed content, I soon found myself advocating the use of studies that featured the manufacturer’s product as the best illustrations. My experiences at the pleasant luncheon and in the scientific discussions made me feel as if the other consultants and I had a kind of social duty to reciprocate both the kindness and the investment made by the sponsor in the slide set. Accordingly, I spoke out about the importance of using some of the sponsor’s studies as examples.

At the time, I failed to recognize that this sense of duty might be in conflict with an intention to create an unbiased presentation about the risks and benefits of [their product]. It turns out that I am not alone. In a study of medical residents, 61% were confident that drug company promotions did not influence their practice, but only 16% were equally confident that their colleagues were not influenced by those same drug company promotions.

How is this possible? Self-interest simply distorts the way we render judgments about ourselves. As Katz and colleagues describe the problem, “When a gift or gesture of any size is bestowed, it imposes on the recipient a sense of indebtedness. The obligation to directly reciprocate, whether or not the recipient is directly conscious of it, tends to influence behavior. . . . Feelings of obligation are not related to the size of the gift.” Precisely my experience.

Other interesting social science insights have emerged from the field of behavioral economics. For instance, Ariely conducted a series of experiments in which study participants were rewarded financially for the number of correct answers on tests. The experiments were designed so that cheating was possible. On the basis of the results of these experiments, Ariely concluded that many individuals cheat when they have a chance, but only by a small amount; they know that they are overclaiming the number of correct answers; but this low-level cheating does not cause them to view themselves as dishonest. When I recently used a university envelope to mail a letter to my daughter, I too did not view myself as dishonest, perhaps because I used my own postage stamp.

Two: However small, gifts influence behavior.

These minor dilemmas fail to cross key moral boundaries with the result that they are not experienced as a conscious and deliberate choice between the size of the reward and the potential cost to credibility or reputation. The frequently expressed view that industry gifts or consulting fees are too small to influence behavior simply misses the point that, regardless of their size, they influence behavior, and a self-serving bias distorts the way that individuals perceive themselves. As a result, industry gifts, fees, or funding have become culturally acceptable even though service in a profession does not itself provide immunity from potential conflicts of interest or from the appearance of conflicts of interest.

Point Three: We ought to be ashamed.

Recent high-profile failures to disclose financial relationships with industry have been major embarrassments to the profession. Several professors who promoted the use of atypical antipsychotics for bipolar illness in children had received hundreds of thousands of dollars that went unreported to their institutions. The new guidelines from the
Association of American Medical Colleges on the efforts to manage the relationships between academic scientists and industry sponsors emphasize transparency. Senators Chuck Grassley (R, Iowa) and Herb Kohl (D, Wisconsin) have introduced the Sunshine Act, which would require the public posting of information about all industry payments or transfers of value worth $100 or more. This act, if passed, will help ensure the transparency that the profession on its own has not yet been able muster.

The author concludes:

The bias of conflict of interest is a behavioral phenomenon. Under the assumption of an accurate report, the design of the trial, the conduct of the study, and the interpretation of the results are perhaps the best measures that clinicians, researchers, and other readers have to assess the possibility of such a bias among their scientific colleagues and themselves.

It’s a fine irony that the worst conflict of interest offenders come from the psychiatrists who are supposed to be experts in these sorts of human motivations.

The article is from JAMA. You need to subscribe or pay $15 to read it in full.

UD thanks Bill.