The Harvard Expert on Dishonesty Who Is Accused of Lying

[travesty of the game [7.08(i)]]

When behavioral-science researchers are accused of misbehavior, the
allegations have a funny way of being a little on the nose. The former
Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser, author of Moral Minds: The Nature of
Right and Wrong, was found to have fabricated data and manipulated
results. The University of Michigan psychologist Lawrence Sanna, who
studied judgment and decision making, resigned after facing similar
allegations. Diederik Stapel, a Dutch social psychologist whose work
touched on such topics as selfishness and morality, fabricated data at
least 50 times, making him “perhaps the biggest con man in academic
science.” And last month, Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School
professor who studies dishonesty—and who wrote a book titled Rebel Talent:
Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life—was accused of
falsifying data in at least four papers, three of which are on their way
to being retracted. Her accusers now suggest that Gino, who has been
placed on administrative leave from Harvard, may have faked data in dozens
of her other published papers.

When I emailed Gino for comment, she referred me to a recent LinkedIn
post. “As I continue to evaluate these allegations and assess my options,
I am limited into what I can say publicly,” it says. “I want to assure you
that I take them seriously and they will be addressed.” (Hauser, for his
part, neither confirmed nor denied wrongdoing; Sanna has not commented on
his alleged misconduct.) The obvious irony of Gino’s situation makes for a
punchy headline—“Dishonesty Researcher Accused of Dishonesty”—but it also
speaks to a vexing paradox of human behavior, one that Gino has herself
returned to again and again in her academic work. “Researchers across
disciplines have become increasingly interested,” she wrote in a 2014
paper, “in understanding why even people who care about morality
predictably cross ethical boundaries.” Let’s assume, for the sake of
argument, that she is such a person—someone who cares about doing right
but, at some point, for some reason, started doing wrong. If so, then what
would Francesca Gino’s contested science say about Francesca Gino?

Gino has published well over 100 academic articles on a wide range of
topics, but much of her research circles back to this essential question:
Why do normal people lie and cheat? Many of her studies work like this: A
bunch of college students complete a simple task (for example, forming as
many Scrabble words as possible from sets of seven letters), self-report
results, and receive rewards based on their performance. Through a series
of such experiments, Gino and her colleagues have tried to show how rates
of cheating will increase in response to subtle social factors. In one
paper, for example, they suggest that people are more likely to break the
rules for a task after being asked to exercise their self-control while
doing something unrelated. Another paper, called “Dishonesty in the Name
of Equity,” says that students tend to fudge results in a way that harms
people who have just been given money and helps people who have not. In a
third, they observe that merely being in the “presence of abundant
wealth”—$7,000 in small bills, strewn across a table like the loot from a
disappointing bank heist—makes people more likely to cheat.

Was Gino herself subject to any of these supposedly dishonesty-enhancing
effects? She was certainly in the presence of abundant wealth: She
regularly taught classes for business executives, and some among her
colleagues at Harvard Business School make nearly $2 million in annual
salary. But another of her findings, from the most cited paper on which
she is listed as first author, seems most relevant. According to that
study, subtitled “The Effect of One Bad Apple on the Barrel,” students who
were exposed to compatriots’ cheating were more likely to end up cheating
themselves. In other words, lying is contagious. And Gino’s work, if taken
at face value, would have given her years of heavy exposure. In the course
of doing that research, she made a point of surrounding herself with
ordinary-seeming people who would end up doing wrong. “The evidence from
such studies paints a troubling picture of human nature,” she and a
colleague wrote in a 2012 book chapter titled “Honest Rationales for
Dishonest Behavior.” Lots of people cheat, they argue, while maintaining
the belief that they remain good and honest people. One way to resolve
this “ethical dissonance,” as they call it, is by comparing your own
misbehavior with that of others. Gino would have had ample opportunity to
do just that.

Another strand of Gino’s research shows how, for individuals, one
dishonest act tends to follow from another. In Rebel Talent, she writes
about “a self-perpetuating cycle of power and rule breaking that can go
too far.” In a 2010 study titled “The Counterfeit Self,” Gino and her
frequent co-author Dan Ariely (who has also been accused of faking data, a
charge that he denies), found that wearing $300 Chloe sunglasses and being
told that they’re knock-offs made people more likely to cheat on a test.
“In short,” the paper concludes, “we suspect that feeling like a fraud
makes people more likely to commit fraud.” You can see how all these
corrupting influences might add up.

Elsewhere Gino posits a mutually reinforcing relationship between
creativity and dishonesty. The two behaviors, she says, are sides of the
same coin. Both are types of rule-breaking. When in the subtitle of Rebel
Talent she writes that it “pays to break the rules at work and in life,”
she is referring to the former kind of rule-breaking, the creative kind,
the ethical kind. But her research findings seem to show that the one can
easily bleed into the other: “A creative personality and a creative
mindset promote individuals’ ability to justify their behavior,” she and
Ariely wrote, “which, in turn, leads to unethical behavior.” In a strange
way, her alleged fraud would serve to both undermine and validate that
work. Undermine because, well, fraud. And validate because she could be
just the sort of rule-breaking creative—just the “rebel talent”—who she
and Ariely suggest is especially susceptible to dishonesty.

Indeed, one of Gino’s papers that makes this very argument—title: “Evil
Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity”—was among the group
in which other researchers found evidence of data tampering. When the
allegedly doctored data are discounted, the effect vanishes. This is the
real irony, then: We can’t trust the research that could in theory help
explain the alleged misconduct, because it might be corrupted by that same
alleged misconduct.

Last fall, after concerns about Gino’s work had already been transmitted
to Harvard Business School, but before the allegations were made public,
Gino co-authored a fictionalized Harvard Business Review case study titled
“What’s the Right Career Move After a Public Failure?” In it, a
businesswoman is fired from her post as CEO of an American fitness
company. She’s so ashamed, she can’t bring herself to attend her 25th
business-school reunion. She gets a pep talk from her father, who
reassures her, as he always does, and then she confesses to her daughter
that she’s been placed on a “forced sabbatical.”

Read: Scientific publishing is a joke

The story is loosely based on the experience of a real-life fitness CEO
named Sarah Robb O’Hagan, but the fictional protagonist sure sounds a lot
like Francesca Gino, right down to the prosody of her name (“Mariani
Kallis”), her status as a Mediterranean émigré (albeit from Greece rather
than Italy), and the fact that both have children named Olivia. Although
the case study depicts the tortured inner life of that character in great
detail—“She dreaded having to explain her unceremonious exit from what she
thought was her dream job”—it never gets around to answering the question
posed by the title. It is, after all, a case study; the whole point is for
students to figure that out themselves. But Gino’s book, which dwells at
length on the long-term dangers of “faking it,” offers what may be
construed as a guiding thought, in an epigraph from The Scarlet Letter:
“No one man can, for any considerable time, wear one face to himself, and
another to the multitude,” it says, “without finally getting bewildered as
to which is the true one.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/07/francesca-gino-
harvard-research-retraction/674630/