Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings (thecrimson.com) 28
"Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings," writes the New York Times. The Harvard Crimson student newspaper has the details:
At least four papers authored by Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino contain fraudulent data, three business school professors allege... The professors wrote that they first contacted Harvard Business School in fall 2021 with concerns of academic misconduct by Gino. "Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud. We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data," the three wrote in a blog post last week. "Perhaps dozens."
Their allegations appear in several blog posts on a blog called Data Colada — the first of which offers this update: As you can see on her Harvard home page (.htm), Gino has gone on "administrative leave", and the name of her chaired position at Harvard Business School is no longer listed... We have learned (from knowledgeable sources outside of Harvard) that a few days ago Harvard requested that three of the four papers in our report be retracted. A fourth paper, discussed in today's post, had already been retracted, but we understand that Harvard requested the retraction notice be amended to include mention of this (additional) fraud.
The business professors concluded there was fraud based on a quirk of Microsoft's Excel files: A little known fact about Excel files is that they are literal zip files, bundles of smaller files that Excel combines to produce a single spreadsheet. (If curious or incredulous, run any .xlsx file in your computer through the program you use for unzipping files; you will find a bunch of files organized in folder.) For instance, one file in that bundle has all the numeric values that appear on a spreadsheet, another has all the character entries, another the formatting information (e.g., Calibri vs. Cambria font), etc.
Most relevant to us is a file called calcChain.xml. CalcChain tells Excel in which order to carry out the calculations in the spreadsheet. It tells Excel something like "First solve the formula in cell A1, then the one in A2, then B1, etc." CalcChain is short for 'calculation chain'. The image below shows how, when one unzips the posted Excel file, one can navigate to this calcChain.xml file. CalcChain is so useful here because it will tell you whether a cell (or row) containing a formula has been moved, and where it has been moved to. That means that we can use calcChain to go back and see what this spreadsheet may have looked like back in 2010, before it was tampered with...!
We used calcChain to see whether there is evidence that the rows that were out of sequence, and that showed huge effects on the key dependent variables, had been manually tampered with. And there is.
In addition, a second blog post notes that one study on honesty had also asked college students what year they were in school — and somehow 35 had all replied with a non-answer, giving as their year in school "Harvard." And suspiciously, all but one of these 35 entries were especially likely to confirm the authors' hypothesis. "This strongly suggests that these 'Harvard' observations were altered to produce the desired effect."
The New York Times points out that this paper "has been cited hundreds of times by other scholars, but more recent work had cast serious doubt on its findings."
Their allegations appear in several blog posts on a blog called Data Colada — the first of which offers this update: As you can see on her Harvard home page (.htm), Gino has gone on "administrative leave", and the name of her chaired position at Harvard Business School is no longer listed... We have learned (from knowledgeable sources outside of Harvard) that a few days ago Harvard requested that three of the four papers in our report be retracted. A fourth paper, discussed in today's post, had already been retracted, but we understand that Harvard requested the retraction notice be amended to include mention of this (additional) fraud.
The business professors concluded there was fraud based on a quirk of Microsoft's Excel files: A little known fact about Excel files is that they are literal zip files, bundles of smaller files that Excel combines to produce a single spreadsheet. (If curious or incredulous, run any .xlsx file in your computer through the program you use for unzipping files; you will find a bunch of files organized in folder.) For instance, one file in that bundle has all the numeric values that appear on a spreadsheet, another has all the character entries, another the formatting information (e.g., Calibri vs. Cambria font), etc.
Most relevant to us is a file called calcChain.xml. CalcChain tells Excel in which order to carry out the calculations in the spreadsheet. It tells Excel something like "First solve the formula in cell A1, then the one in A2, then B1, etc." CalcChain is short for 'calculation chain'. The image below shows how, when one unzips the posted Excel file, one can navigate to this calcChain.xml file. CalcChain is so useful here because it will tell you whether a cell (or row) containing a formula has been moved, and where it has been moved to. That means that we can use calcChain to go back and see what this spreadsheet may have looked like back in 2010, before it was tampered with...!
We used calcChain to see whether there is evidence that the rows that were out of sequence, and that showed huge effects on the key dependent variables, had been manually tampered with. And there is.
In addition, a second blog post notes that one study on honesty had also asked college students what year they were in school — and somehow 35 had all replied with a non-answer, giving as their year in school "Harvard." And suspiciously, all but one of these 35 entries were especially likely to confirm the authors' hypothesis. "This strongly suggests that these 'Harvard' observations were altered to produce the desired effect."
The New York Times points out that this paper "has been cited hundreds of times by other scholars, but more recent work had cast serious doubt on its findings."
Entomology (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Username checks out.
Re: (Score:2)
Entomologists study insects, it doesn't mean they are insects.
But some are probably quite creepy
Another victim (Score:2)
Ah, another victim of the Saruman effect, where studying the ways of the Enemy makes you fall into them.
Re: (Score:3)
Saruman effect eh?
Personally, I see it in my local police department where the police have become criminals and are currently under investigation by the FBI for gang like behavior, after it become public that they had identified common citizens who protested after trump was elected as gang members and used gang-breaking tactics like no knock warrants and RICO seizures to pursue them
And then there is this beauty: Police union director fired after opioid smuggling arrest [apnews.com]
Nothing like absolute power, to corrupt
Publish and Perish (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Publish and Perish (Score:3)
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No, It's An Example of Cheating (Score:2)
Another example of the academic tendency to judge work by quantity and not quality. Research has to show something new.
No, it is not an example of that. It is an example of someone who cheated for their own benefit which is a story as old as the human race. The fact that universities measure research by both quality and quantity (not one or the other but both) just sets the rules of the game. If we had different rules why would you expect him not to cheat those as well?
The only way to prevent cheating is to not have any rules but we decided a long time ago that that was much worse than dealing with cheats.
Re: (Score:2)
a study of a study which studies... (Score:2)
From her bio page: (Score:4, Informative)
"“Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules in Work and Life.”
lol
Oh, The... (Score:1)
Oh, the irony (Score:2)
Looks like the 'honesty' researcher took a detour on the road to integrity and got caught in the lane of deception.
Re: (Score:2)
Implementation is just down the hall, next to Fabrication.
Irony (Score:1)
Maybe the scholar studied honesty because (Score:2)
...she didn't understand honesty.
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I saw a panel from a comic somewhere ... I'd post a link but I can't remember where I saw it.
There's one [wordpress.com] by Clay Bennet, seemingly tagged as (first?) appearing in The Christian Science Monitor, that closely matches your description, but there are others, such as this one [toonpool.com] by Jon Carter, of a similar, if more individual, nature.
Not surprisingly it's a rich vein for cartoonists to mine.
Perfectly predictable. (Score:2)
The prevalence of people putting one face on in public and a diametrically opposite one in private is too long to go over. One could test the maximum post size limit of this forum by trying to list all of such behaviours in the current US congress.
I am not surprised by this in the slightest. People are going to people, and no list of credentials is long enough to guarantee they won't fuck it up.
Of course (Score:2)
Harvard hasn't produced any worthwhile graduates in like 30+ years. In fact, more likely than not, if you went to Harvard in the last 30 years you are probably a completely useless tool of a human with zero redeeming qualities.
File format (Score:4, Informative)
A little known fact about Excel files is that they are literal zip files, bundles of smaller files that Excel combines to produce a single spreadsheet. (If curious or incredulous, run any .xlsx file in your computer through the program you use for unzipping files; you will find a bunch of files organized in folder.) For instance, one file in that bundle has all the numeric values that appear on a spreadsheet, another has all the character entries, another the formatting information (e.g., Calibri vs. Cambria font), etc.
You can thank OpenOffice/LibreOffice for this. The competition forced MS Office to do better.
MS Office file formats used to be essentially a memory dump. Even MS Office itself couldn't properly read them half the time if your version was different by a month or whatever.
all are bogus (Score:2)
Almost all of these "behavioral" studies are bogus. They start out with a hypothesis -- an axe they want to grind -- and find some way to "prove" it, by finding "evidence" that could be evidence for a million things, but in particular might be for their hobby horse. Usually they are done on small groups, and with very poor controls. This time someone got caught, that's the only news.
It's Harvard (Score:2)
Harvard figures very prominently in the CVs of national politicians and people who run big business. It seems to me that honesty would not be a common trait there.
I have a grand plan (Score:2)
I plan to apply for a grant to study gullibility.