Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
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Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. This is the second and final part of a series we are revisiting from last year. Stick around for an update at the end of the episode. Last week's episode was called Why is there so much fraud in academia? We heard about the alleged fraudsters. We heard about the whistleblowers and then a lawsuit against the whistleblowers.
My very first thoughts were like, oh my God, how's anyone going to be able to do this again?
We heard about feelings of betrayal from a co-author who was also a longtime friend of the accused.
We once even got to the point of our two families making an offer to a developer on a project to have houses connected to each other.
We also heard an admission from inside the house that the house is on fire.
If you were just a rational agent acting in the most self-interested way possible as a researcher in academia, I think you would cheat.
That episode was a little gossipy, for us at least. Today, we are back to wonky, but don't worry, it is still really interesting. Today, we look into the academic research industry, and believe me, it is an industry.
And there is misconduct everywhere, from the universities.
The most likely career path for anyone who has committed misconduct is a long and fruitful career.
Because most people, if they're caught at all, they skate. There's misconduct at academic journals, some of which are essentially fake.
There may be something that sounds a lot less nefarious than what I just described, but that is actually what's happening.
And we'll hear how the rest of us contribute, because after all, we love these research findings.
You know, you wear red, you must be angry, or if it says that this is definitely a cure for cancer.
We'll also hear from the reformers who are trying to push back.
It was a tense few months, but in the end, I was allowed to continue doing what I was doing.
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This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
Last week, we heard about two alleged cases of data fraud from two separate researchers in one paper. The paper claimed that if you ask people to sign a form at the top before they fill out the information, you will get more truthful answers than if they sign at the bottom. After many unsuccessful attempts to replicate this finding and allegations that the data supporting it had been faked, the original paper was finally retracted. The two alleged fraudsters are Dan Ariely of Duke and Francesca Gino, who has been suspended by Harvard Business School. Gino subsequently sued Harvard, as well as the three other academic researchers who blew the whistle. The lawsuit against the researchers was dismissed. The whistleblowers maintain a blog called Data Collada. They have written that they believe there is fake data in many of the papers that Francesca Gino co-authored, perhaps dozens. Gino and Ariely, meanwhile, both maintain their innocence. They also both declined our request for an interview.
On that one paper that caused all the trouble about signing at the top, there were three other co-authors, Lisa Hsu, Nina Mazar, and Max Bazerman. None of them have been accused of any wrongdoing. So let's pick up where we left off with Max Bazerman, the most senior researcher on that paper. He also teaches at Harvard Business School.
When there's somebody who engages in bad behavior, there's always people around who could have noticed more and acted more.
Bazerman was close with Francesca Gino. He had been her advisor and he trusted her. So he has been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the mess. He recently published a book called Complicit, How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop. And he's working on another book about social science fraud. This has led him to consider what makes people cheat. Let's take the case of Diederik Stapel, a Dutch professor of social psychology who, after years of success, admitted to fabricating and manipulating data in dozens of studies.
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