Harvard "Honesty" Researcher Fired for Dishonesty

Counterintuitive study about "making ethics salient" apparently bolstered with bogus data.

A prominent Harvard Business School professor, noted for her social study research on honesty, just lost her tenure due to allegations that she has committed academic fraud in her papers about honesty and methods for improving it. As the Harvard Crimson reported on Monday:

Harvard revoked tenure from Francesca Gino, the Harvard Business School professor who has been fighting data fraud allegations for nearly four years, and ended her employment at the University last week, a Harvard spokesperson confirmed.

The move concluded Gino’s two-year battle to keep her position at the school — and marked a historic penalty for a faculty member at Harvard, where no professor is known to have lost their tenure since at least the 1940s, when rules for the academic protection were formalized.

Gino, a behavioral scientist who became famous for studying honesty and ethical behavior, was accused of manipulating observations to better support her conclusions. Before her work came under scrutiny, she was a prominent researcher in her field and the fifth-highest paid employee at Harvard in 2018 and 2019, receiving more than $1 million in compensation each year.

The incident sort of reminds me of the of the Sokal Hoax from 1996, when NYU physics professor Alan Sokal submitted what was probably the most absurd academic paper ever penned— “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”—to Social Text, a prestigious cultural studies journal edited by eminences such as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross.

Professor Sokal deliberately made the essay as outrageously ridiculous as possible—while dressing up with fashionable academic gobbledygook—to test if it would be published by virtue of flattering the editors’ ideological preconceptions.

Back then I wrote an essay on the hoax for The Salisbury Review. The experience of researching it was a lesson in what can happen to so-called “social science” when it becomes corrupted by ideology.

Curious about Professor Gino’s scholarship, I read her paper—“Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end”—coauthored with Lisa L. Shua , Nina Mazarb, Dan Ariely, and Max H. Bazerman.

The paper presents a practical method for encouraging people to be more honest in reporting the truth of vitally important matters such as federal income tax returns. To quote the opening paragraphs:

The problem with curbing dishonesty in behaviors such as filing tax returns, submitting insurance claims, claiming business expenses or reporting billable hours is that they primarily rely on self-monitoring in lieu of external policing.

The current paper proposes and tests an efficient and simple measure to reduce such dishonesty. Whereas recent findings have successfully identified an intervention to curtail dishonesty through introducing a code of conduct in contexts where previously there was none (3, 4), many important transactions already require signatures to confirm compliance to an expected standard of honesty.

Nevertheless, as significant economic losses demonstrate (1, 2), the current practice appears insufficient in countering self-interested motivations to falsify numbers. We propose that a simple change of the signature location could lead to significant improvements in compliance. ….

We propose that with the current practice of signing after reporting information, the “damage” has already been done: immediately after lying, individuals quickly engage in various mental justifications, reinterpretations, and other “tricks” such as suppressing thoughts about their moral standards that allow them to maintain a positive self-image despite having lied (3, 10, 11).

That is, once an individual has lied, it is too late to direct their focus toward ethics through requiring a signature. In court cases, witnesses verbally declare their pledge to honesty before giving their testimonies—not after, perhaps for a reason.

The authors propose changing the signature location to the beginning of the document.

Right off the bat, this proposal sounds implausible to me.

Taking an oath to tell the whole truth before a jury—with the jury members watching—induces the witness to think carefully about what he is about to say. This is not the same as signing the front page of a document that one fills out in the privacy of one’s office.

The process of filling out an income tax return document is so tedious that it causes the urge to take a nap. The signature requirement at the end of the document—attesting that the information is accurate—is the primary mechanism for inducing the taxpayer to wake up and contemplate the truthfulness of the income statement.

In other words, the proposition contained in “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end” is counterintuitive and implausible. It therefore comes as no surprise that the data was allegedly fudged to support the proposition.

I often wonder what the scholarly Yankees who founded and ran Harvard for its first 350 years would think about the institution today. My favorite Harvard man was the polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. I suspect he is now turning over in his grave.