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There is no need to highlight the irony of Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School researcher of dishonesty, among other topics, being accused of data falsification in a number of her publications.
It does perhaps add to the irony that, in writing about a recent episode of the HBO series Succession, she praises resort to “motivated reasoning”, defined as “a cognitive process in which people use their pre-existing beliefs to interpret information in a way that supports those beliefs”. Similar to “confirmation bias”, this is indubitably a prominent ingredient in the recipe for research misconduct.
Equally, we should be wary of confirmation bias ourselves. Psychological sciences are notorious for shady statistical practices and irreproducible results, and it has been speculated recently that some researchers of dishonesty might have a predisposition to cheating.
The three-person Data Colada team that claims to have uncovered anomalies in the data underlying several of her publications were evidently very sure of their conclusions – and Harvard agreed, punishing Gino with a two-year unpaid suspension. Equally, Gino is not taking this “unwarranted and excessive” punishment lying down, arguing in a lawsuit against both Harvard and Data Colada...
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