Fabricated data in research about honesty. You can't make this stuff up. Or, can you?

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

Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino are two of the biggest stars in behavioral
science. Both have conducted blockbuster research into how to make people
more honest, research we've highlighted on Planet Money. The two worked
together on a paper about how to "nudge" people to be more honest on
things like forms or tax returns. Their trick: move the location where
people attest that they have filled in a form honestly from the bottom of
the form to the top.

But recently, questions have arisen about whether the data Ariely and Gino
relied on in their famous paper about honesty were fabricated — whether
their research into honesty was itself built on lies. The blog Data Colada
went looking for clues in the cells of the studies' Excel spreadsheets,
the shapes of their data distributions, and even the fonts that were used.

The Hartford, an insurance company that collaborated with Ariely on one
implicated study, told NPR this week in a statement that it could confirm
that the data it had provided for that study had been altered after they
gave it to Ariely, but prior to the research's publication: "It is clear
the data was manipulated inappropriately and supplemented by synthesized
or fabricated data."

Ariely denies that he was responsible for the falsified data. "Getting the
data file was the extent of my involvement with the data," he told NPR.

Read The Hartford statement to NPR:

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23888902/the-hartford-statement-to-
nick-fountain-npr.pdf

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190568472/dan-ariely-francesca-gino-
harvard-dishonesty-fabricated-data