Academia is BROKEN! - Harvard Fake Data Scandal Explained
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- Опубликовано: 4 сен 2024
- This week a top Professor at Harvard University was exposed for data FRAUD. The evidence is damning, and it is hard to see how Francesca Gino can argue her way out of it. This looks bad for Gino, but also it looks bad for behavioural science in general. She isn't the only example of data fraud in the industry either, so if you want me to cover more of this type of content, let me know in the comments below!
The Articles/Blog Posts:
Part 1 - datacolada.org...
Part 2 - datacolada.org...
Part 3 - datacolada.org...
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Having published in a handful of scientific/academic journals, I have not once been asked for actual deidentified data. The expectation is that researchers conduct themselves with honesty and integrity, but obviously that isn't universally practiced.
Thanks for commenting this. Anyone asking how peer-review didn’t catch this. 👆
@@PeteJudo1 I'm the "anyone asking" and thewolf's post makes my point. In general the peer review system is dead. The world of "Doveryai, no proveryai", trust but verify (Suzanne Massie), has parted company with some sectors of the scientific community. And we wonder why there are people who live by another mantra, "There's a sucker born every minute." (P.T. Barnum)
Not properly peer reviewing scientific proffers has cost people their lives and it is worth more than an "anyone asking how peer review didn't catch this" snark.
Hopping here to mention that Dan Ariely is also considered to have falsified data, it's definitely not just Francesca Gino
I want to say peer review should take care of ensuring honesty and integrity but we all know that's a joke. That's why the only people reading academic journals are academics.
@@PeteJudo1After monitoring the academic caliber of Harvard’s products/graduates (aka degree ‘recipients’, NOT earners) vs their ability to perform, I’m not in the least surprised!!
Without excoriating all of them, I’ve long become weary of encountering them directly and recently constantly watching their mendacious behavior headlining the news for epic failures.
Harvard used to represent status, respectability and imminence. The past 30 years have certainly changed my perception of exceptionalism. Narcissism and absolutism pervade their credentials so I’m much less apt to blindly trust. Worse they’ve selectively had an epiphany recently regarding their own ROOTS in slavery by their founders while endlessly castigating anyone else for lesser acts. I’ll send the link, info on this but RUclips chooses to block these topics.
It’s a sad fact that an Ivy degree doesn’t certify anything. Indeed it may be something to avoid like the monumental damage inflicted by Jeffrey Skilling, Rajat Gupta, Elizabeth Holmes, Alissa Heinerscheid, etc.
Higher Education itself isn’t impressive on the whole either. Look at all of the graduates collectively who have been DEMANDING their SLD be mystically ERASED. Their degree obviously isn’t paying off, TOO many haven’t found work and began boomeranging back home around 2008 which has become ‘normalized’. It’s a pathetic narrative that these grads have formulated and cleave to.
Maybe she wouldn't fake the data if there was a pledge of honesty at the begining of her paper.
😂😂
LOL
Lol
Lmao
Nah shes more creative than that
The fact that this was only caught because she was so terrible at faking the data really raises eyebrows. How much data is faked by competent fraudsters?
Probably at least 10x more, I'd say.
There are entire fields of "study" built on extremely dubious research. 10 years ago in my first Psych class the professor told us that most psychology studies cannot be reproduced and that a lot of data is faked. In a decade, nothing has changed.
It's no wonder mental health is poor for so many people when the entire field of study is polluted with bad data and studies that aren't scientifically sound.
( Not to single out Psychology -- Quantum Physics is another field with a lot of people wasting their time )
Or, how did she become professor with an understanding of statistics and datasets so limited they can't even cheat properly?
@@Anankin12she probably was really good at it. But with time she just didnt think about the consequences of cheating, shed done it for years now. So she just got sloppy
@@gorgit he made a list of very obvious suspicious things that would have been very easy to fix. Going back for years.
The correlation between ethics professors and unethical behavior is staggering.
The correlation between professors and unethical behaviour is staggering, I would say.
Same with some therapists and psychologists. Some people take those positions to control people or make themselves feel better that they have better lives and manipulate others.
But also remember, there are honest men and women that want and try to help. Just remember shitty people should not be treated the same as those really trying
That's behavioral psychology in a nutshell.
Now we need to run a study to see if that correlation is actually a causation.
I mean, they study ethics. That clearly implies that they don't have much innate knowledge on the subject.
I was doing a meta-analysis once for a bio-medical project. I came across a research paper that I was pulling data from. The papers contents read good and showed a positive correlation in the outcomes of the intervention. I went to looking at the tables to pull the hard data and I just couldn't make sense of what I was reading. It felt very off. I'm not great at understanding the deep depths of statistics, so I took that paper to a professor of statistics, who had to take a moment after looking at the tables. As it turned out, the tables had been carefully put together to obscure that there wasn't much of a correlation at all. The authors didn't blatantly lie in the paper, but the text implied one thing, while the tables obscured the truth of another thing. It literally took a PhD in statistics to see what they were doing.
This is very common where people only show desired data they can explain.
What is shocking to me is how unsophisticated the fake data is.
Lying is hard work
You're right, their mistakes could've been easily avoidable. Which makes you think of how much data out there is faked in a way which cannot be discovered, full ideologies would be broken if that's the case
Just like covid data
@@storykli5137 Too hard for Harvard professors apparently!
They probably never thought they would be asked for the data.
I used to work in a lab, and after putting my blood and my sweat into research, I generated excellent data. One day the professor showed up and claimed that he needed to get a patent for his company and with my work but without my name being acknowledged and asked for my work. Immediately after he received the work, he told me that he would give me another project to work on as he wanted to show investors that he was the one who generated the data in order to secure more funding. when I protested his decision, he fired me and stole my notebook. As an international student, I had no way of getting compensated and was left in limbo. People like these should be removed from academia!
I believe you. This happens a lot to international students. The professors take advantage
You should have kicked his ass!
Good luck. The Entire academia is this.
🙁 thats awful . depending on how long ago that was, a (international?) attorney might be able to help you with that.
I'm sure you learned a tough lesson. Always question everything.
She should just rush and publish a paper titled "How reliable are Academic Studies? Determining the likihood of falsified data passing peer review."
That would’ve been an amazing move 😂😂
That would be a 3D chess move
Exactly what I scrolled down to say if someone else already hadn't.
There are tons of this kind already though
Schrodinger's paper
One of the reasons I dropped out of my PhD program. The "publish or perish" motto has legitimately ruined academia
Academia is broken because of the behavior of journals. Decades ago, negative results were publishable as it helped fellow researchers not to follow the same path or learn what doesn't work, but nowadays they are thrown out by journals because journals demand only positive results. So, this practice of manipulation is becoming increasingly common.
Agreed, it isn't really research if you know what you are doing, researchers should be allowed to fail.
The pressure in psychology to produce novel results, with no resources other than access to some undergraduate subjects, has been forcing researchers to p-hack for at least 60-70 years. It was a huge problem when I was getting my doctorate in social psychology 40 years ago. It isn't just the journals, its the whole system. Only substantive changes in academia will fix this. Journals publishing negative results will help but that's not enough, the pressure will still exist to generate novel findings from quick studies with zero funding. In psychology, if you can't get multiple quick publications of unusual results, you don't have a career. Some possible solutions are pre-registering hypotheses and methods before the work is initiated, with the publication of results assured. Another idea is making replication part of the standard graduate school requirements, like a second year project, with journals specifically publishing replications i.e. The Journal of Psychological Research Replication.
It's more complicated. negative findings may result in spam. Here is a video, why particle physics has a similar problem: ruclips.net/video/lu4mH3Hmw2o/видео.html
Absolutely right, I tried duplicate the research on so many journals, only 20% that had the same results. I don't know what to believe anymore.
Journals don't accept/reject papers. Scientists acting like peer-reviewers do. We need to change the culture in Science to accept again interesting negative results
One correction … this proves getting CAUGHT being a fraud is unacceptable in the profession BUT being a fraud is how to rise to the top in the profession
It's like politics
@@nickg1895way too much like politics
Ok. Let's do a paper about this. I will properly fake the data, in case the hypothesis is nkt true 😋
You are SOOOOO right! Best example of this are fraudulent climate "scientists" like michael mann.
@@Tiago_R_RibeiroJust don't forget to re-sort the spreadsheet when you are done!
Man, it’s almost like she was given an incentive from an invested source to lie about her performance. Someone should do a study about that.
Theyll go missing or stop halfway through for "unknown reasons"
There’s a term for it that’s been around for ages. It’s called bribing
Society is a brothel. - Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
Why not her?!? 😜
There’s a famous saying: You get what you incent. And it often holds true. She’s an obvious fraud who has harmed the industry for perceived personal gain.
The most surprising thing about this is how bad they are at faking their results
The researchers who challenged her findings aren't vigilantes, they're professors at universities. Challenging your colleagues's work is meant to be part of the job. It's kind of like calling the SIU vigilantes.
I found that word choice really odd, too.
Peer review is what separates scientists from charlatans.
Eh... he's being pithy.
yeah man they be like batman and batverse or some shieeeeeeeet
Too bad there's no money in replication
The most striking thing about this, is how badly the data was manipulated. Imagine how much research is manipulated and goes unnoticed.
Researchers need to book results after a while or they lose their financial backing.
At least there is data to manipulate. I have seen meny examples of papers using no data at all. Only using references to sources that don't use data themselves (the source only uses their own hypothesis/opinion and have no source data).
between 2 and 14%
@@Duke00x even a meta study on real studies dies under publication bias. Studies that show are correlation are published. Null-Result studies remain unpublished and their raw data lost for ever.
Uh, all of it, really.
More people should consider that finding out that your hypothesis didn't pan out is a good thing too. You still made progress by figuring out which route you should avoid taking.
Absolutely agree
How many honest genius scientists are underemployed to make room for con artists? This hurts our society.
This so true.
Well, ethical scientists don't get employment in Academia anymore since the change to publish or perish. You are at a disadvantage from the beginning, during your PhD you can publish 10's of bullshit papers or 1-2 genuine really good one. Problem is that even if you publish good ones, they won't have enough citations by the time you graduate to let you get a tenure track in a good institution.
I agree, I didn't even go to college and this is infuriating.
@@futurethinking
I like being in math, where lying about your results to your journal is essentially impossible to do.
The proof is the paper itself, and requires no trust on the part of the editors that you didn’t lie.
Sadly, since diverging from small communities where you knew pretty well the competence of each individual, society nowadays rewards you for appearance rather than merit. You are much more rewarded for being an incompetent con artist that knows how to lie convincingly than a competent and productive honest Pearson.
Their cheating technique was so lazy 🙄. Clearly cheaters don't necessarily have increased creativity
The really scary thought here is that many other cheaters might not be nearly as lazy
@@anttiasikainen3124 Why is this scary? Everybody knows that you shouldn't take this kind of research serious. For example if you want to know how potential customers react to a new feature in your product, then you do a study yourself because you know that if you consult the research papers you will not get any truth. You will get what suited the researchers best. If you ask a company to do it for you then the company will look at your behavior to estimate the results that best suit you and they will make a study up to confirm what you want to hear, because else you will not hire them in the future again.
'u2063'
Haha, great point
Yeah if you gonna cheat do it properly at least. Your whole career depends on this, afterall
Francesca Gino's research into dishonesty is basically just a journey of self discovery.
you should get all the likes!
Good one.
Yeb. In her book about how breaking rules will get you ahead in life, she's speaking from personal experiences lol
@@caib714 "Gee, i have to be really creative when i'm lying about my findings."
Next hypothesis: Dishonest people are more creative.
😂😂😂😂
It's actually hilarious that all of these papers are about honesty
Note to self: When falsifying data in a spreadsheet, be sure to re-sort the data afterwards.
That is my main takeaway, she got caught mainly because
1) Nobody bothered to actually scrutinize her work.
2) The data manipulation was so badly done.
And yet it took many years for someone to finally notice the anomalies, now imagine how many competent grifters are out there and nobody suspects anything...
@@webaazul2500 Is it just me thinking about -global warming- climate change?
@@ii795 it's not *just* about that.
But all the "research" by these crooked blue blooded universities can be & must be questioned. These "Ivy Leagues" have sole purpose. Manufacturing believeable intellectual crap that the TPTB can use to sell their propaganda.
But they no longer even care about the intellectual part. e.g. Judith Butler's book is literal diarrhea on paper without any intellectually honest research sticking to any actual academia. Yet, the TPTB use it to push the gender madness.
@@ii795
Given how many industries, companies and even governments rely on so called "Greenhouse emitting processes", if climate change was a hoax they would've debunked it a long time ago due to a strong incentive, that is not the case; so I think that one is pretty much cemented as a real thing.
@@ii795except climate change isn’t solely written about by a single rogue researcher and is instead a topic agreed upon by thousands of independent researchers who study things like that for their profession.
She wrote a book that is literally called: "Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules in Work and Life."
I mean seriously, how much more transparent do you expect her to be? She literally advises people to break the rules to advance their career. Why would she not take her own advice?
😂👌
can't be angry with her; she wrote a manifesto on how she operates
Isn't really that bad of an advice. Following all the rules to the last letter is really bad, and can even harm the company (aka Italian strike. Edit: also known as work-to-rule or slowdown)
Have you read "Corruptible: who gets power and how it changes us" by Brian Klass? You should because, it's like a survey of the scientific research on Power, and it's not unknown for ambition to trump professional ethics in pursuit of status and power. And the culture in academia can foster that urge, because it's "publish or die.c And no journal is interested in negative results. They're on the look out for attention grabbing articles that might jump the gap to the mainstream. And Gino obligingly supplied results that fit the bill. BTW, Klass mentions very early on a case study on a former career financial criminal, who cites his ability to learn new ways to steal money throughout his career as the foundation of his former success. Klass argues that one of the key characteristics of the powerful is that they are lifetime learners. And this criminal at his height was making 6-figure sums, when a million was a lot of money. So, the incentives are powerful, esoecially when your disciolibe is struving to align itself with government. For example, the former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, installed a Behavioural Science unit in his government called the Nudge Unit, because the academics working in it promised to be able to use their expertise to shape policy and communication in order to persuade or nudge the general public to behave in ways that fulfilled policy goals... Creepy isn't it? But, just search here on RUclips, abd you will find behavioural scientists pushing that narrative. For myself, especially after watching Succession, and reading sime old favourites like "The Dictator’s Handbook: why bad behavior is almost always good politics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith (an updated 2nd editon was published last year), I'm inclined to be more sceptical and cautious of such endeavours. Especially after how his administration ended, and what followed. Those who wield power - even thev good ones - often have a complex relationship with ethics and morals. Tge problem is, whilst they may have talents in specific domains, and they acquire power because of that, they may be no more immune to folly than any one else other domains. And when the powerful succumb to their flaws, the result can be anything from significant to catastrophic. But read both these books, and I'd read Corruptible before The Dictator's Handbook, because the former is slightly more theoretical and broader in its scope, than the latter, which focuses purely on the politics. Corruptible explains why as a species our relationship with power can tend to be challenging. Happy reading!
That’s a slap to the face to any student dreaming of entering academia. Basically confirms all my suspicions that it’s not about who is doing the best work or knows what’s happening, but the people who can trick others into making it look that way (especially investors/funders and school heads)
I ended up realizing my dream of working in academia and I cannot tell you how disappointed I was. The pursuit of knowledge and truth are rare now. It's all "publish or perish," so "researchers" make up stuff or they are totally biased and pick and choose data. It's a joke.
Those of us who value knowledge and truth are swiftly bullied out of our positions.
I blame the 'vaccines causes autism' guy. It all started with him.
@@falconeshield I think it started way before that.
How about it has always been like that and you have to find the strengt not to be bullied out?
@@falconeshield They always lie on safety or efficacy, HPV Vaccine actually never have been proven to prevent cancer, and sadly it actually causes it.
Don't underestimate the power of wokeness. Personal bias has a significant impact in transparency on research.
We need to force journals to publish statistically insignificant results. The pressure to publish
But isn't the entire point of publishing in premium journals is that the data indicates significant results?
@@boncoderz1430 it shouldn’t be. We should incentivize scientists to have strict standards, not incentivize them to just try and get a certain number. This incentivization has led to so much damage
or rather prevent publishing from being such a burdersome costriction that you have to publish even if you have nothing to add. Publishing isn't really the only way a scholar can be useful to the community. A most important way, for sure, but not the only one.
How ironic, liars doing a study on lying and then lying about their results. (Update: the irony lies in the statement many would have us believe: "Trust the Science!")
That's not irony.
@@ShortArmOfGod it is. supposed to pass as credible
Psychoanalysts would have a lot to say about that...
There they were at the crossroads.... a fork in the road...
One path led to the city of Truth, the other to Falsehoods.
They saw a person there but did not know which path led to which city, for the signs had fallen. The paths were both well worn, and there was no other indication. Legend had it that once you go to the city of Truth, however, you only tell the truth, and likewise for the city of Falsehoods with only telling lies.
But which was this person from?
Due to time constraints, they only had one chance.... one moment for a question...
and they asked "Which path goes to the city of Truth?"
The person lied.... and the wrong path was followed.
If they'd only asked... "If I asked you what a person in the city you're from would say was the city of Truth, which would they say?"
A Truth teller would tell you what a truth teller would tell you... and lead you to the city of Truth.
A liar would tell you a lie about what the liar would say... the person from that city would obviously point you to the wrong city, the city of Falsehoods, so the liar would point you to the city of Truth.
And you would follow that path instead....
It's a shame they did not ask the right question.
it's generally called 'projection'. you also see it a lot in cheating spouses, dishonest employers, and any religious leaders, which includes academics.
Pete, please also expose teachers publishing their students' work as their own. Not even as co-authored...
That’s nothing new, literal centuries worth of work
@@Blurredborderlinesdoesnt change the fact that something should be done about it, its wrong
Now apply this perspective to patent applications for centuries
😲
China & Russia are the major violaters of patents, copyrights, trademark...
the whole point of "peer reviewed" articles and studies is specifically to prevent this. Whatever organization agreed to publish her failed at their job imo.
These were top journals! And this isn’t the only time this has happened!
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking about. It seems that the peer reviewing is broken in the field. Doesn't mean all academia is broken, but maybe they haven't set a high enough standard in this field for checking datasets.
Academia and media share one important trait: some sources are considered "trustworthy" and are therefore approached with much less scrutiny as they should, if at all.
The joint authors failed to. Their names were on this. They didn't do the crime, but they didn't do much to stop it either.
lol, this is not new. American Scientific made a big study of their own publications and concluded that a great percentage don't even reach the criteria of being scientific.
There is a saying where I leave; “don’t believe any statistic, that you didn’t fake yourself”
My undergrad degree is in Psychology. When I took the senior research class, the instructor (she was grad student adjunct, not a full professor), told us that if one statistical test did not bear out our hypothesis, we should try another, and another, etc., until we got the results we wanted. I was shocked. When I questioned whether this was academic dishonesty, she shrugged and said, "This is how it's done." The entire field is a sham. I went to grad school for something else entirely.
STEM OR HEAL
but most likely STEM
and Last Finance
You can fake results in any field. Behavioral scientists just have a greater opportunity to leverage contextual nuance against anyone who reproduces the study and obtains null results. Psychologists are employed by major companies around the world to study psychology and ultimately increase the bottom line. They would not be employed if they didn't produce tangible results.
It’s stuff like this that give social sciences like psychology a bad repute, and they only have themselves to blame for not setting up/adhering to standards. Fudging the numbers to fit a particular narrative is not what real scientists do. This adjunct professor should try politics, she’ll fit right in there.
That seems to be the way drugs are researched and I bet that is why that research is so expensive.
@@benjigeez unfortunately, in academia, it's publish or perish.
On the other hand there are people who have worked really hard on their research and have had to resubmit papers to one journal after another to try and get published because journals just don't care about negative results. It's unethical cheaters like these that are actually driving good honest research OUT of the top journals. No sympathy here.
I think it is the system that is problem here. The cheaters are more of a symptom. Even if no one cheated, the bias towards surprising results over repeated studies would still result in most of new research being wrong.
I think its also related to the status of researcher being from "elite" universities. This happened in both sides. I imagine if the critics of Gino did not came from U. of Penn or Yale, would someone listen to them? This "elite" uni special treatment perhaps what softens the editorial work on them. I cannot blame the reviewers too, some reviewer worked unpaid for hours, and perhaps Gino's reviewer only able to review the logical sequence of the paper, the accuracy of representation (not the validity), and since the diagram looks made sense, they did not pay enough attention to them.
In academia everyone knows that you need strong positive results to get published and you need to get published to not end up out of academia or in a job as an adjunct making minimum wage. The people who succeed then are either excessively lucky to keep getting great positive results, or they are cheaters. As someone specializing in dishonesty, this professor must have been well aware of the dominance of cheaters in her discipline, and she made a pretty easy choice to not buck the trend and have a successful career.
@@galois6569es but the fact that only studies with extreme/shocking results get published is ubiquitous among researchers IS the driving factor for lies and deception
i feel like publishing negative results should be just as important as positive ones. you need to know what doesn't work, not just what works, right?
Study the relationship between dishonesty and success as a Harvard Professor.
Paging Senator Warren…
the relationship between dishonesty and success is a net positive one when you are the right type of dishonest. Look at corporate America lol
@sandman4663 yesh woke corporate America thats destroying the free market. Its easy to see that nonsense.
.....er..... stupidity.
As an engineer, we're I to try to fudge data I'd not get caught out making such sloppy and stupid mistakes.
@@dagreatpenguini “durrrrrr pAgiNg sEnaToR wARrEn sHe mEAn tO eLon”
I knew the mouth breathers and incels would be in the comments of this video, even though they have absolutely no idea what the point was.
Before we get into whether she was fudging the results or not, the fact that she was trying to find a causal link between test result honesty and cleansing products tells you all you need to know about her and the institution.
To that end, I'd like to apply for her now-vacant role with funding for the following hypotheses:
1. Can I attract better looking birds driving a Ferrari or a beat up Chevy?
2. Do Coldplay play better gigs when I have a front seat, VIP ticket, compared to when I don't ?
3. The statistical probability of a coin toss outcome conducted in the Bronx compared to a four star hotel in Bali.
If the Provost can forward the application papers ill be right over .
With her most recent book titled “Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules in Work and Life,” she certainly practiced what she preached, breaking the rules to profit.
If you ain't cheating; you ain't trying.
Sounds like a sub builder I read about
Reminds me of that person who wrote a book about murdering someone actually killing someone. I think it was last year they were found guilty of murdering their spouse.
@@paxluporum4447 Probably one of the most shittiest mottos I´ve ever heard
@@thatrandomcrit5823 I would suggest you only follow it when you face a dishonorable opponent.
Stunning. These people aren’t scientists, they are data marketers.
It’s all about funding, and one could argue that system is what’s broken.
the last few years showed that really well... lots of data is fake...
So called "science" is completely corrupted!!
Absolutely everything. Sad but true. People who say it isn't are too dumb or in it.
These are all Muppets with "degrees" paid by the industrie and others.
So yeah, the system is broken. Since the very beginning.
Capitalism is fundamentally fucked. When everything's done in the pursuit of profit, things like "facts", "compassion for other humans" or "morals" are just hurdles.
@@paulunga when the CDC is nothing more than a pass through for corporate interests, then we have people like Fauci taking “royalties”. Laws have been broken, and if we aren’t a nation of laws where these people are prosecuted then I agree -we are f’d.
But the system IS what's broken. It's "publish or perish," so if you're not constantly putting something out there you won't make it. Universities need your papers to get money, so they don't care what you put out there.
People with ethics have a really hard time in such a system and many of us get bullied out of it.
No one would believe that 80% of students would lie. Makes me question this field in general.
The only way something like this could happen anyways is in an experiment where the subject is strongly encouraged to lie. And unless you’re specifically testing for that…well, you get the point.
What I find it interesting is that she weighted the study towards lying but kept fudging the data until she got the results she wanted. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to try to find the breaking point, when the incentive to cheat becomes statistically significant?
Exactly. I find it extremely suspicious that the percentage of uni students lying was below 95%
Trump would have self-reported 20 correct out of 20
@@odins_claw Really? For a few bucks? That's sad.
@@jeffjones6951 Of Course, just as everyone would expect
If he did otherwise , observers would expect they were being manipulated by him.
Whole different psychological game going on with Trump, or any Trump like character.
I was struck by the sheer silliness of the subjects of the articles. Also the fact in the first paper that the subjects being tested were lied to - telling them that their answers were destroyed when they were presented. No good person would tell such fibs!
I noticed that too. And the smug asswhole who revealed this unethical subterfuge basked in the laughter of his audience who obviously thought lying to study participants is so so amusing doncha know.
She’s just the one that got caught. She absolutely is not the only one. It is thousands of these professors that do this.
I wouldnt be surprised that it would be most of them
And not just professors. Imagine how much expertise large corporations with lots of money to make who have captured their regulatory agencies have. It’s unlikely we’d ever find out.
The most interesting thing about this video is the self awareness dawning on him that his entire paradigm is wrong and he's actually useless.
Yeah, and the fact that her manipulación of data was so obvious un these cases makes me lose hope. What could a skilled cheater get away with?
Yup, specially those research that caters to certain political ideologies.
I am at the end of my academic career -- I published my first academic paper in the 70s. When I got my first professor job - at a major research-oriented university, the expectation was that you would publish 2 (or 3 max) papers per year. If you published that few now, you would quickly lose your job (definitely not get tenure, definitely not get grants - which is what drives your research). But, you really cannot publish more than 2 or 3 and have them be high quality, so profs are forced to publish more, and therefore lower quality, papers. At one point my chair told me to publish more papers -- and said explicitly that the university did not care about the quality of the papers, just that there be 5-6 papers published per year. This is all coming from the administrators "managing" professors and finding simple metrics for gauging scholarly "productivity". Fraud is just the most egregious outcome of the system -- the worst part is just having to wade through all the dreck that is being published. So some universities give more weight to papers published in high prestige journals, which are always looking for papers with surprising results -- which leads directly to this kind of fraud. It is a systemic problem, not a problem of a few bad apples.
Why do administrators want more papers published per year at the cost of their quality? Surely they understand that is not going to make the university more prestigious, nobody measures how good a university is by "number of papers produced".
The same reason you have Stupids metrics in every job, they need a metric to show to the higher ups / to determine who is working and half the time they don't know or care about the metric just that the people under them are getting good results so they can say that they're managing the office/university the right way
"Production for the sake of production - the obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market or in planned economies - leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion."
- Félix Guattari
@@freshrockpapa-e7799Universities compete for prestige. Administrators want to advance the university and come up with often stupid ways to do so, like cooking up dumb metrics like number of papers published.
There are lots of junk journals that will publish pretty much anything for a fee. Publication at its lowest level just means the paper is formatted correctly and written in passable English.
@@freshrockpapa-e7799Admins are the shining example of bureaucracy and it’s many idiotic flaws which only a bureaucrat stuffing their pockets would want.
In research, less than 10% of hypothesis are leading somewhere. For genuine researchers it should be no shame admitting inconclusive results. That is also a contribution to knowledge.
@@SigFigNewton This. Verifying the null hypothesis doesn't get you grant money, doesn't arouse the interest of prestigious journals, and certainly doesn't get you that sweet, sweet impact score.
Null results are important
Those genuine researchers don't get even the most ordinary tenure-track positions in US universities any more. Most successful research professors produce anywhere between 10-30 publications per year. It is IMPOSSIBLE for any human being to be aware of the details of every publication, even at the lower end of that range.
Yes, it keeps other labs from wasting recourses on dead ends, and especially time. My PI told me he had read well over 1200 articles about one specific subgroup of proteins, and committed to reading any new material produced. Knowing what all these others had contributed saved him a lot of time.
But inconclusive results don't get you rich and famous I guess...
Getting published in a journal is like getting a trophy just for saying you've won.
Move the standard to peer review, and make people sign a waiver that'll ruin them financially if they're caught lying to the journal.
These people should receive fake paychecks for their fake work.
And get the George Floyd threatment when they ultimately attempt to use it
Explain how is fake so you can not be deceived and I can follow you.
Which people?
@@kirito3082why the bait man lol
In the us these days all pay checks are fake.
She ought to get sued. Other researchers have built their research on top of her data. Harvard has seen there reputation muddled. Her coworkers could be collateral damage
She should be criminally charged. This amounts to embezzlement of government funds due to the grants involved. She stole from the American People.
That's stupid. Coauthors are responsible for what they put their name on.
@@michaelgoldsmith9359They're probably referring to other people who've referenced or performed studies that relied on her data being true
@@michaelgoldsmith9359 Mind you, if you're going to attack a comment with ad hominem first thing, at least proof read your own to make some sense. How did you end up with "coauthors" when he's talking about people basing their work on hers? (That's referencing, in case you didn't know. Not collaborating)
As a person who has authored papers with others, it would be a pretty huge betrayal for one of my coauthors to lie and spoof data. If I have to check every piece of their work with a fine toothed comb and recreate it myself, why even have a coauthor in the first place. In any sort of big data field it’d be essentially impossible.
The fact that it would tarnish my name is another reason why it’s unacceptable to do
This is especially disappointing because psychological research is already looked down upon, now people have even more reason to be suspect.
Remember when scientists discovered the Viceroy butterflies taste bad too (re Monarch mimicry)?
This was proof that science doesn't work. , because scientists found their theory was wrong and changed it.
My point: trust in scientists is fragile in a post-factual society. Gino makes it so much worse.
It’s looked down upon because it’s all based on nonsense
@@jimmymaracas6442based
Is it even really psychological research though? It's garbage pseudo-science done in a garbage field of 'business studies'.
@@JoseRodriguez-lp7rs Based base
Stop calling them vigilantes. They are scientists. Just good scientists.
Academic fraud should be prosecuted imo. Often universities just fire the person and that's the end of it, but there is a lot of public money involved and it endangers credibility of science as a whole.
It's embezzlement
You wouldn't believe how much of your tax dollars are funding complete scientific frauds. It's disgusting.
im pretty sure it is a crime if the research used public funds
100% agree. Much government policy is based upon scientific research. A huge amount of resources can be allocated based upon findings.
In the Netherlands a Dutch researcher has been caught and sentenced to 120 hours of community service. With addition of a settlement of 1,5 years of salary to avoid further criminal prosecution. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel
I'm going to wait for her to release a new paper about how all the cheating she did on the previous papers was actually just part of a larger study on how much cheating you can get away with in academia. People like her always double down.
BASED
PATRICK BATEMAN will be proud
the ultimate research paper
She is not enough creative for this, she proved it by how bad she was at faking those data.
bro 🤣🤣🤣
And that would be ten magnitude more stupid than what she has done. Even if that's true It would be a terrible experiment set up with like zero research value. Three academic fraud from one person? That's a joke of a sample not even fit for primary school project for 10 yrs old.
I'd like to take a moment to thank the three vigilantes for trawling through the data to bring this farce to light. Well done, gentlemen.
Yup. True scientists and academics
Peace. Well done, GENtle people. Peace.
Their called actual scientist's, all they did was their job in verifying others work before accepting it as true. Something that has been deliberately stopped and replaced with peer review, to facilitate this exact problem.
@@requited2568 I hope you won't get mad at me, the grammar nazi.
It's "They're called actual scientists..."
@@LoGStein no worries. Not sure how I did that, but will leave my shame for all to see.
Think I started out with Their job is... And changed it.
The craziest thing to me is how little effort they put into faking the data.
The advantage of the rise of scientism. The undying trust of the flock who will blindly believe you based on your scientific reputation and credits on paper (and the success of your career), and the reputation of your employer (in this case Harvard) and the praise received from fellow scammers in similar positions and part of the same cliques of con-artists posing as scientists making supposed valuable contributions to the sciences.
Wow, I'm a data analyst and not even a good one and looking at this data is hilarious and looks like something a clueless intern would do. Harvard professors should be able to fake data better than this lmao.
Oh no…
Well, in the future, they'll be able to use software generators to produce plausible data that passes the obvious tests such as Benford's law.
Or maybe that's happening already and it's only those who are really sloppy at fabrication that get caught.
They are, and I'm sure they do on a regular basis, that's why most do not get caught.
I doubt they even collect their own data. Which is why they don’t know how to fudge and get caught so badly. They couldn’t even be bothered to ask the poor grad/assistant that most likely collected the data the structure first before they went and fudged it.
It requires a degree of sophistication to fake data convincingly. Those professors in my experience are math ignoramuses most of the time, they just learn certain statistical techniques by rote. The rest is just the art of pulling wool which is far less sophisticated.
I was shocked to learn that when a paper is submitted for peer review, the reviewers usually do not have complete access to all of the original data. This makes it impossible for reviewers do properly check the paper's analysis and conclusions.
You usually read it and give a few comments, suggest some citations or some changes to the paper, but you never go through any tables or check any data.
If the paper is very closely related to your research, you might assign a grad student to try to replicate the results. In that case you might request the original data. But otherwise you're not really equipped to evaluate the data, so there's no point in having it.
When reviewing, you're mostly checking the methodology, ensuring clarity, and so on. You assume that the data was compiled correctly and honestly. Somebody will check the results in some future experiment; that's not the reviewer's role.
@glenm99 This sounds similar to the replication crisis of the 2010's or am I wrong?
@@glenm99 I would think that a peer ought to be "really equipped to evaluate the data". You're his peer, after all. Also, the reviewer should check the methodology by reviewing how the data was analyzed. In the famous Michael Mann paper about climate change with the hockey stick graph, the data was massaged in a way that any input values would show an increasing trend. Without adequate review, any paper could contain misleading graphs, misleading statistics, and unwarranted conclusions. Even a completely honest author could have inappropriate statistical analysis.
@@Ashakat42 The replication crisis is ongoing since the 80´s, and nothing has changed since 2010, don´t kid yourself.
My wife is a researcher in the medical field, and she was horrified by the system implemented in some departments at Harvard: they would put several teams on the same subject and let go of those... Underperforming. Think about bad incentives.
This scandal at Harvard is just a small speck of ice, sitting on the upper tip of the iceberg.
This is horrible to hear
Interesting...
The thing about research is that it's not hard to get the answer you want: that's a simple matter of switching statistical operations until you get the answer you want.
The trick to research is asking the right questions; developing the right tools.
A better question is why people are dishonest to begin with.
It's crazy that all of these articles have to do with honesty as well. It's almost like she's projecting what she's doing.
There's a lot of projection going around these days...Once you are aware that folks/groups do it, it becomes very easy to assess what they are really up to.
AI research is the worse, is probably the most corrupted sector of science atm. Money rules over everything of course, even physics is affected by political and ideological propaganda, just look at Einstein work, nothing was proven of what he suggested yet.
Her field of research.
"Dishonest people are more creative! 🤪"
Kinda meta
Also ironic that being such a massive cheater and full of it, she was incredibly non-creative when it came to hiding her cheating. Kind of further disproves her own hypothesis
And it's so hilarious how we are always trying to romanticize our defects
ALL her articles need to be retracted. Imagine having a professor who lies and cheats. What kind of role model is that?
They need to be reviewed. There’s no reason to toss a good study from a shitty researcher
Her PhD should be revoked. If she’s cheating here, she’s probably gotten away with cheating getting there
Dr. Eddi Guerrero
That would set an insane precedent. Journals make no claim that all papers they publish are true.
@@aaronlandry3934No way. That's like firing a worker and demand they backpay years of salary.
In case nobody else tells you, I super appreciate the rundown on your video at the beginning. I'm usually listening and don't get the chance to search a description for a summary.
That being said, you're wasting your time. I always manage to finish them:P
Sometimes good science means null results. We had an academic scandal at my university and it was painful. We'd spent 4 years pursuing hypothesis formulated from fabricated results. We couldn't get their antibodies or their transgenic mice to work and yet 'we' were viewed as the problem. We were made to repeat our results over and over on the assumption the original paper was pristine until the news broke regarding the main investigator, and his graduate students taken in by other PIs.
I think the pressure to publish on top of the pressure to find 'surprising results' can lead to academic dishonesty, but there should be a greater push from academia and industry to publish the non-surprising and null results. It might lessen the amount of duplicative bench work and bring greater integrity to the fields. Pre-registering studies and public data repositories are starting to gain traction but I wish the process were faster. This sort of open sharing can certainly shed greater light on fraudulent data, as revealed by Uri, Joe, & Leif.
This problem has been known for many years, what's the incentive for the system to change?
At what point do we revoke a PHD status
This is exactly the problem, our economy is so warped it's better to cheat and get paid than to do actual science and make a living off it.
Null results are good, double checking and peer review is worth studying and spending money on
It's cause the mice were gender neutral. You said they were trangender mice.
@@tigreytigrey8537 Transgenic, not transgender.
The craziest part of this data manipulation is she wouldn’t have even been caught if she wasn’t so messy and lazy with the fake data. Seriously. If she had just sorted it and labeled it identically to the other answers… we would never know. And that’s not cool.
If she's not lazy, she will made real research
@@uranus.tlatoani She did real research, it didnt give the answer she wanted so she changed it.
Is that you Jimi?
@@ssu7653 that's no real research is real faking
It always strikes me how lazy these guys (Schoen... etc) are when they are fabricating their data. But, honestly, these guys can't be all that dumb!
Now this would lead to an unpleasant conclusion ...
This is why journals should demand all data and materials be publicly available as a requirement for publication
Sure, but who is going to go through all that? Reviewers aren't paid and it already takes a lot of time just to evaluate the paper.
I agree. The very least any journal publishing quantitative research should do is check for a properly 'cleaned' dataset. All three examples here would've failed that review. Most journal are particular about the software used for the studies submitted to them for publication, so I don't see so much effort needed to get people to look at the datasets that support the research. Model or modeling errors can be ferreted out by peer review or the readers themselves.... Perhaps, we need to grade the publishers on such a minimal compliance basis as this.
@@punkinholler i dont know, but atleast 3 professors did in this case, and thats all it takes.
@@punkinholleryou underestimate the power of nerds on the internet.
@@SaintRubiconyea, once again, 3 unpaid professors after like a year or more of researching it. Maybe if there was an incentive or something, given we live in a capitalist hellscape. But something absolutely does need to be done, i just dont want people to turn this into one giant “academia bad” thing bc of one professor. Theres still thousands of hard working researchers out there doing real work.
This type of behaviour, is more common than people think! It occurs in all fields of research!
I bet it occurs more in some fields than in others, depending on the nature of the discipline (if indeed the field qualifies to be considered as a discipline.) The disinterested search for truth does not drive a field which is structured around political positions.
I worked for the world’s biggest research journal as a copy editor from 1992 to 2005; fraud is rampant and covered up. Millions of dollars are at stake.
Did your journal ever knowingly publish fraudulent data, or was it covered up later?
@@auralit8I believe the latter is the implication
how the F would a copy editor be able to discern that?? 🤣🤣
I'm reminded of the apocraphyl saying that most psychologists go to school to figure out what's wrong with them. The fact she studies honesty isn't ironic, its telling.
It's horrible. But also a product of the pay system: she keeps her job only if her research papees are sensational. She gets even more money selling articles on the rhe studies. It's a society problem. Because people cheat and cut corners all the time in even regular, non academic jobs. We're taught to never admit mistakes and this is the result. More lying to others and others
That would actually make her a genuinely good and honest pure soul. I don't believe this. People who are true to themselves are true to the world as well.
@@basedoviThat's not what he's saying. He's saying they do it unconsciously.
He's saying that they're projecting.
@@k_tess I know mate. Unconscious but still a good hidden virtue, albeit not acknowledged by them.
It would be funny if she came out and said she did all this on purpose to see just how long it would take people to actually check the evidence and not believe what others are saying so easily and THAT was part of her behavioral analysis
Part 4
"This itself was a psychological study"
Would she top or tail her explanation with an honesty pledge and which would impress fellow 'academics' most?
A true narcissist would 100% play it that way!
This would be a great way to recover her career with an actual legitimate paper.
The sweetness of that ending caught me so off guard it nearly made me tear up. I just realised how that kind of sentiment even towards people who could be deemed 'the enemy' is so valuable.
How can you say her papers are discredited when her paper “Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity” proved her point! 😂
Because she faked the numbers in a very ordinary, boring way. She's not an evil genius if she got caught.
Simply editing the data while leaving behind so much breadcrumbs is hardly a creative way to cheat.
@@olivermorin3303 Yes cause she couldnt be bothered to reorder it proves she fake it! LOL NO! If only she thought to reorder it! LOL
@@michaelbuckers shes so so thick she didnt think to reorder after editing the results? LOL WHAT A DUMB CLAIM!
What is creative about betraying trust? It’s the easiest form of deceit.
The sadest thing about this isn't them merely manipulating the data - it's that a Harvard Prof does worse in creating fake data than basic imputing algorithms
Underrated comment!
Well she is a behavioral scientist…. I wouldn’t exactly consider that the most technical science out there
Damn...
I guess Harvard needs to put an honesty pledge at the TOP of their employment application forms from now on
STOP giving t hem Money, it encorages them'
@@friarnewborg9213 Harvard has acquired enough money to exist for the next 2 centuries.
Please explain. I understood, from the investigation's conclusion, that, contrary to the paper's conclusion, there was no statistical significance in results of placing the honesty-pledge at the top or bottom of the application.
@@ericgrosch8073 Its sarcasm, not a serious appeal
🤚🎤
As an honest academic, this kind of thing really pisses me off!
Academia needs to find away to incentivize researchers to publish the trials that didn’t lead to the expected results so others learn from it as well and avoid that path.
I guess I will present them 3 hypothesis about predicting the future to see if they fund me. I bet the results will be surprising.
* Tomorrow will be another day
* After the storm calm will come
* In only 2 days tomorrow will be yesterday.
😂
The truth is it’s a lot of work. Preprint archives like arxiv are perfect for that role, yet a lot of work goes unpublished. It’s seen as a waste of time writing up results that don’t advance your career or field-nobody got a doctorate with inconclusive data.
You would think that’s desirable. But it’s something that is looked down upon by someone like my PhD advisor. He would simply imply that it’s a skill issue (meaning you executed your experiments poorly) for being unable to produce positive data. That’s why academia is so toxic and many PhDs are not remaining in it (myself included).
the problem are also the journals: they often do not want to publish research that yields uninteresting results or replication studies that try to verify ore refute another paper. simply because new and interesting gives them better PR/means to earn money than unintersting and old. the second big part is how the peer review is handled. the journals basically go to random researchers in the same field and ask them to check a paper/study. the researchers get paid pennies for this and often don't have a lot of time to thoroughly check everything. I've read stories were the professors simply relegated this to some or student or a postgraduate. and if the paper doesn't look completely bogus / illogical it gets okay-ed.
another big part is how research budget is getting alloted. once again everybody only wants to finance studies that yield big, new, interesting results leading researchers to go for fringe topics and issues with specifically designed studies to ge the result they want.
its a host of issues that lead to a very unfortunate situation that academia finds itelf in.
Yet there should still be a journal or archive where somebody can publish an article that just says, "well this didn't work."
That data is honestly so strange. Like, it’s not what I would call “blatantly faked”, and it’s definitely not well hidden. It’s just… weird. The “Harvard” school year in particular is just bizarre.
It’s almost like a third party who didn’t even see or understand the study was told to change the data to create the desired result
Agreed - Starting the video I expected that data had failed benford's law or similar advanced tests for randomness, but the manipulation is beyond "lazy". Why even maintain the files at that point? Or why not take the 10 seconds to re-sort and strip metadata? It's like making counterfeit nickles on a xerox then trying to sell them to the feds.
ChatGPT would be very good at doing this.
@@jamesdavis3851 Because they thought no one would bother to carefully inspect it.
I know right? Why wouldn't you just sort by smallest after fudging the data? Then it would all be hidden within the set and wouldn't stick out.
@@jamesdavis3851I am not even angry at her for faking the data. I am angry at her faking it in such a simpleton manner. A 10 year old with basic excel knowledge could do better than her.
She’s gonna come out saying this whole scandal was a part of her latest, most elaborate experiment 😂
But she’ll do it with a ukulele
@@cashmilla 😅
Brilliant
It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if she did that. It’s the perfect get out of jail free card for her topic of study.
Awesome!
Hey, that was nice of you to state the truth and still lend support to her. Well done, you have demonstrated Grace!!!!!
Honestly i am not shocked - when i wrote my bachelors' thesis in psychology my professor basically demanded that we tamper with the dataset in order to produce an effect since the total dataset wasn't showing anything
Same this is a huge issue with data and statistics that they can be manipulated, often there is an incentive for researchers to do so.
This is very sad as it undermines public trust in academic research in behaviour studies.
@@Coastpsych_fi99Wow, that’s crazy. Can you guys elaborate why you think they would want that?
@@fluriekfluriek2913 Universities are for profit and so are researchers at those universities. More attention means more money.
So what did you fake your research on
@@fluriekfluriek2913 because it makes them money
The scariest part of this is that all her mistakes that got her caught were really stupid, and could have easily been prevented with more careful cheating. Which makes me wonder if falsifying data in psychology research is far more ubiquitous than it looks.
Ubiquitous was not in the "enrich your word power" in Reader's Digest. Nice work. Thank you.
Not just psychology either, although it's probably one of the easiest.
People who will do this are arrogant. They always think they are the smartest one in the room and it will be easy to dupe others because they are stupid.
Falsification in ANY field is coarse for the par.
Generally, our "experts" are frauds.
She wrote a book called "Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life" in 2018. 😐 I hate liars like her ughhh....
Makes sense that she'd write that😂
Yeah I listened to that audiobook too, I can't believe it happens on Harvard
...but isn't it great when they get exposed and taken down by decent people, bent on keeping society from drowning in the insanity these liars create?
Tax loopholes?
She clearly reaped the benefits of breaking the rules.
Now consider how insane things are in the fields I work in: Politics, International Realtions, Literature. There's no data as such, only arguments. Any old echo-chamber guff gets over the line.
This should be a felony......why is it not? Lying in a position such as she had, should come with SEVERE consequences.
how are you going to find and prove who is lying ? You need to spend money to do that.
@@curious_one1156 "how are you going to find and prove who did the murder? You need to spend money to do that." Isn't that just what investigations of crimes are about? Spending the money to gather enough evidence to prosecute the person who caused harm. Seems like the guys who've published these articles were able to do whatever digital forensics needed to confidently allege deliberate editing of the data.
Freedom Rings, socialist.
@@NoBaconForYouou would be killed by smart people if there were as few laws as you seem to want
It's not a legal document, you can't charge them with perjury; the first amendment protects the right to lie in most situations, this one included. The solution isn't legal consequences but increased skepticism of academic studies that haven't been reproduced by multiple independent researchers. Repeatability is the cornerstone of science, if an experiment hasn't been repeated multiple times using the same methodology, the results should always be suspect.
They should take the same approach as the game speedrunning community: if you're caught cheating, you're banned for life and all your submissions retracted.
there would have to be a peer reviewed study on the individuals who are being accused
this would result in some mega back rubbing
This actually happens often in science
@@gronki1 it seems to be happening more often and everywhere
As long as you have total control of your data and no one else had a chance to munge it.... I guess that your plan would be a deterrent. But how often does that happen, that the author of a paper never gives access to it to anyone else before it is published?
And freeze and reclaim their assets gained from the lies right? Dream got all those awards After he was caught cheating lol
Shocked that Harvard Business School would be associated with dishonest behavior.
lol
member harvard had an office for Epstein after his conviction.
Or Stanford biology
An important review, thank you, and appreciated the tender messaging to Francesca Gino at the end. Just one thing, but important: "vigilantes" act outside the law, whereas the academics who tested Gino et al's data and found it wanting were conducting research well within scientific rules. They were testing it properly. Real life vigilantes take the law into their own hands, without objectivity. I know rerecording this so many times would be a lot of work, but perhaps some comment about this is deserving for the brave three writers who took the issue on? Thanks again for the main message of this video, very helpeful!
One positive about this story is that due to pubpeer, retraction watch and a growing number of people actively calling out fraud (i.e. Elizabeth Bik), these kind of people are increasingly being caught whereas 20 years ago they may not have been.
Is your explaining character. There is an absolute lack of character in america today. That probably has everything to do with the Psychological operation, as in, psyop, that they, military/gov't. entity, have been presenting unknowingly to this population of liars and cheaters.. The lack of character today explains exactly everything we're seeing in the population of what is allowed.
Recently 3 students duped several academic journals. They reworked Mein Kaumpt as a feminist paper snd it was readily accepted. Not only was it accepted they invited the authors to be reviewers.
@@freegeorgia4808 Can you send me a link to the story?
Agreed. But do we think she is the only one who has been lying for the last 20 years.
How much of the academy's foundation is built upon junk-research dressed up to look fascinating, incredible, impactful?
How much has been used to create cultural and political movements whose activists are so believing in their truth, yet their entire outlook is predicated upon lies?
@@freegeorgia4808makes sense.
I’m glad someone actually investigated her. The social sciences especially have degraded into a collection of opinions being passed as fact.
Sadly
That's actually how they started. People are just carrying on a proud tradition.
As a social scientist, I concur.
It’s not just the social sciences that are at risk. I’m thinking of all the infomercials that begin. “A study at ….. shows…
“Social Science” is an oxymoron.
The scary part about this is: she (or whoever altered the data) was only able to be caught like this because she was sloppy. She could have easily re-sorted the sheets, and then it would have been much harder to figure out where the manipulation was. How many people have faked data without making such elementary mistakes?
Yes and no. Maybe the manipulation wouldn't have been caught, but as shown in the video, a number of researchers found the results suspicious which means even if they couldn't find problems with her methodology, they would still make a strong point for independent replication with good transparency and then the lack of successful replication would cast doubt on the original studies. Independent replication is a cornerstone of building established scientific knowledge which is why I'm always frustrated with how many people hype up novel scientific findings before enough good research has been done.
@@yiorgosh4739 Yeah, that's a great system. By the time the fake is called after all the later research she has had a prestigeous career and retired rich.
@@johnpublic6582I don't know why the sarcasm. Science is a process for better understanding the laws of nature, despite our human biases and failings. There have been many egotistical and shady scientists and doctors throughout history. That's not a hit against the process. To the contrary, the success of science over time speaks to how powerful the process is despite our human bull****. If you want to feel better about someone getting their comeuppance, look elsewhere.
Good point. So, what makes us so willing to accept that someone so good at her craft was that skoppy? How do those two thoughts coexist?
Isn't it nore likely that she did not alter the data?
@@codyspendlove8986 Do we know for absolute certain that she (or, again, whoever it actually was; I don't actually care who) did alter it? Well, no. However, it's at least a plausible explanation for the evidence. What would be your explanation for why spreadsheets that are otherwise sorted in particular ways just happen to have particular rows out of the sorted order, _and_ that those rows just happen to be among the ones contributing the most to the claimed effect, often having most of the extreme values, _and_ that when plausible real values can be hypothesized, substituting those makes the effect disappear completely? And why the weirdly consistent bad answer to the "year in school" question?
_And_ this apparently happened at least three times, maybe four (I don't know about the fourth instance alluded to, but presumably there's similar evidence in that case). How likely is this to happen by chance? _How_ does it even happen without tampering? (Seriously, I don't have ideas about alternative explanations; if I did, maybe I could bring them up. If you do, then maybe we can discuss them, because I realize there is a possible cognitive bias here.)
Also, just what craft is it she is supposed to be good at? Doing science? Writing academic papers? Sure, those make sense. Altering computer files without leaving forensic evidence? Not necessarily. Not to mention, she may not have thought anyone would bother to look at the raw data, although admittedly I'm not sure why, seeing as the results seemed too good to be true. It is indeed a little baffling to me why someone seemingly so smart would be so sloppy in this one way. (I would like to ask: Do the researchers at Harvard, or at many universities, routinely make files with their raw data accessible as a matter of course or even as an institutional rule, or was it just good fortune that hers could be found? If she really thought no one would ever look at the files, or that they _couldn't_ look at them, then it makes more sense why she wouldn't bother to cover up the anomalies.)
Then again, claiming such small p-values in a field like psychology seems suspicious in itself. If the data really was tampered with, that in itself wasn't so smart. Much better to be modest about it, if possible (obviously, p-values aren't necessarily easy to manipulate arbitrarily, but still...). Not, of course, evidence for or against it being fraud, but maybe it helps to answer the question about seemingly contradictory thoughts coexisting.
Well, this year alone, the Chancellor of Stanford got sacked up because he was allegedly manipulating the data of his research 👀
I did my master's in Software Engineering and started my PhD in the same college. After a few months, I got so disgusted by the massive egos of everyone in Academia I decided to quit before I lost my soul in that mire. I've been working in the private industry for nearly a decade now. I've met with CEOs who are worth hundreds of millions. I'm yet to see anyone with an ego as big as random teaching assistants in my old university.
Honestly, I'm amazed anyone is able to achieve anything in the world of academia.
The stories I could tell... there are some groups that are actively trying to change... but that is the exception and not the standard.
CEOs are the epitome of humility... Jeffery Skilling & Dennis Kozlowski come to mind right away.
I’ve worked on both sides of the aisle, I worked as a research assistant for a decade after getting my BSc in Physics, I’ve also worked in the oil and gas industry after getting an MSc in Geophysics.
What I’ve noticed is that the egos are just a large in the business world but they’re found only at the highest levels and in most corporations they are not allowed to interfere with the operation of the business.
There is much more accountability for your actions and behaviour at all levels of a company than you would find in an academic research setting.
The world of academic politics is much more intense, more personal and more viscous than in the corporate sector precisely because their is little bottom line to damage.
Corporate shareholders and boards of directors take a very dim view of infighting which gets to the point of impacting the image and profitability of a company.
Whereas two professors and their respective research teams who are feuding don’t get reined in, the university normally doesn’t involve itself in such matters as long as the feud isn’t too public and damaging to donations and reputation.
You’re right in how disgustingly low academics can stoop to, in 10 years of working in a lab I’ve seen tantrums which would put toddlers to shame. I’ve also seen darker things happening which are best left unsaid.
I can only imagine. I've only studied to bachelor level, first in the humanities and then later in STEM, and have been put off by academia just from outside observation, enough to know that it's not something I want to be part of.
I think there's something to the idea that the egotism and ideological leanings typical in academia, particularly the humanities, can be attributed to the fact that professors, etc. may have authority in their field but zero direct influence in society (in contrast to business/military/political/religious leaders), leading to an institutional case of inferiority complex.
Anyway, good on you for having the awareness and self-respect to remove yourself from that mire, as you aptly put it.
@@glenyoung1809 You put in a long time! I'm getting a second doctorate and I have 5 years in academia (for work). I'm amazed at the tenuous ties to the hospital and department. It feels like no one (dean, finance, payroll, supply chain) knows what we do even on a multi-million dollar project. It isn't that we need more oversight on my studies, but allies to help get our work done. No one believes me when I say it is cut throat; I'm glad you said it. Eye-ing industry....
There was an identical case in the Netherlands about 5 years ago. A prominent researcher who published in top journals was revealed to have made up all his data, in order to have results that journal editors would probably like. He ruined the careers of all of his graduate students.
Sounds like a good case for not allowing studies to be published until it's been peer reviewed. True peer review.
@@shanepurcell8116 There often aren't enough peers to review and there is too much pressure to churn out papers.
Actually from my experience , the science behind sex orientation, or evolutionary biology is just A fake falsified science that is pushed by Dollars and has no bases in reality.
@@shanepurcell8116well, that would mean that the reviewers would have to try and replicate the study to "review" it. And I don't see that happening anytime soon. There's too few reviewers as it is because you're not paid for reviewing and it eats time you don't have as a scientist.
A normal review is basically just reading the paper and using your knowledge of the field to judge whether it all sounds plausible. And no, you typically don't have access to all their Excel files. If they even use Excel, because it might just as well be a multi terabyte database in combination with a half gazillion of Python and R scripts to wrangle that data.
The only shocking part to me is how sloppy they were on faking data
Seriously -- why wouldn't they set the p value to 0.045 or something? I don't know psychology in particular, but having a p value of 0.0001 in itself should be considered a red flag in almost any discipline.
That dishonesty/creativity paper is extremely dangerous for society, especially coming from Harvard. We already have corporations ruined because of what their leaders learn at top business schools like Harvard, Penn Yale et all (money above all else, even if you have to fake numbers and cheat and do things nearly-illegally), but having an actual paper from Harvard that basically rewards dishonesty really is scary.
Btw: I know someone who went to Harvard. She said the hardest part of Harvard is getting in. Yes the education itself was good, but she felt it wasn't anything "special" beyond the pedigree, and she said she likely could get just a good an education elsewhere.
Did she really make a paper to boost her own ego by calling cheaters 'geniuses'?
That's what I thought too!
She clearly knows what she's doing and wants to feel special about it.
People love to be called demigods and such by academics. Make them feel good in their boring lives
At the start of my PhD I remember that I tried to replicate results from two separate publications and for the life of me simply could not replicate them and blamed myself. I’ve heard anecdotes from other academics that apparently as much as 85% of all published data cannot be replicated. It legit chills me to the bone to think of all the hours I’ve spent reading research papers that are (most likely unintentionally) completely inaccurate and how much of it I’ve included in my own work.
Edit: Original comment over-exaggerated academic dishonesty and I felt bad 😔
Same thing happened with me during my masters, I had the simple task of replicating the results from a paper, then applying a new idea on it. I don't know the integrity of that work, but there was so much missing details considering that it is an engineering paper. We never replicated the work, and I got fed up from this project and moved to another. I have no idea how that paper got published, simply because the information provided in the paper is not enough to replicate it
The reproducibility issue is more to do with insufficent research design rather than fraudulent conduct as far as I'm aware - at least in terms of biology lab based work.
@@somedude1666 i am not claiming that they are frauds, I am just astonished that it was published without sufficient design details
@@somedude1666 basically, I am saying that I don't think some journals review papers well enough sometimes, and thus might be vulnerable to fraudulent behavior
@@darkpistol96 I didn't even see your comment tbf lol I was replying to OP.
Yeah it's pretty bad out there though. Its difficult to trust the data available when data from different labs can be so highly variable from the same experiments.
We absolutely need a journal of insignificant results to be one of the most respected journals in academia.
Unfortunately grey literature wouldn't sell as good as "50 shades of Grey" 🫠
It's interesting tho to consider how that could lead to problems. Perhaps paper gets publish to said journal far to easily and are just a quick way to make money.
Perhaps people use a large set of studies on there to dismiss new findings, without considering it.
I'm not saying either of these would happen but considering if they could is worth while if we are going to push for it.
What I can say will happen is that people of certain philosophy would hate a journal like this as it would "entrench norms and social social construct as real"
@@darkpheonix77 Papers already get published far too easily as is evidenced by the hundreds that must get retracted each year. It is highly unlikely that such a journal will need retractions since it is pretty clear that significance is still what everyone chases. The primary idea of a journal of insignificant results would be to push back on that and actually to get people to do replication studies.
I don't think it should be up to the authors, or even the reviews, whether a paper be deemed significant to the field
@darkphoenix77 Just create a publicly-owned repository. An university-led infrastructure. It is simply rather improbable that a for-profit organization will ever be interested in honest academics over well-craftdd cheating.
This would also have the effect of breaking into this overall very absurd and ridiculous 'market' of academic publishing. With how much public money is in research, it's simply absurd to have to _pay_ a journal to publish your findings, only for other public institutions to then _also_ have to pay to receive the largely publically funded conclusions. Just create an open access repository, have the peer Review be an additional task for tenured professors and voilà - you have your counter-weight.
Profiting from fraud and thus being incentivised to commit fraud is not a reason to do so. This is unforgivable.
Falsifying scientific data should be a crime. Research like this influences some very important areas of society. Laws, government, business, society as a whole. "Scientific" studies and papers directly influence so many things. On top of that, these people are defrauding and lying to people for their own economic benefit. She should receive a prison sentence.
You would be surprised at how much garbage gets published in the medical field.
unfortunately those that are in a position to put forward and enforce such laws are also the ones often with a vested interest in pre-determined outcomes...
Fraud on steroids due to the persuasion these lies are used for. Immorality. Criminal. :(
Or you know, don't make decisions based on a field that relies on creativity and changes constantly?
no, that directly goes against free speech. You are allowed to publish whatever you like. What is going wrong is the scientific method, namely reproducibility and peer review. Eventually, as in this case, someone will review things in greater detail. But sometimes it might take decades before someone does (and for things people don't really care that much about, it may never get reviewed). Accountability comes about when caught out, you tend to lose your job and are very unlikely to get hired in the field again. It is up to each institution to protect its reputation by holding its researchers to a high standard.
I attended a conference several years ago regarding Usability and Security on behalf of the company I was working for at the time, Google. One of the papers at the conference was a fraud study of another large internet company, which I'd worked for previously, so I was excited to see the talk and what the professors had concluded based on their extensive, data driven study of my previous employer.
It was all a sham. The study presented finding and sweeping claims which were verifiably false. They presented charts and graphs with "projections", meaning they'd fabricated all of their data instead of finding a data source or simply working with the company in viable data sets. The talk contained no actual data sources or reliable citations at all associated with the company or even a third party with knowledge of the company. It was shocking to say the least, because this was a tenured professor at a top university, presenting the results of a peer reviewed paper. He'd cheated on his homework.
And nobody called him out?
@stevengordon3271 Nobody does. First because everybody trusts credentials and two, it is just a circus, those who could call him out were also cooking data in their own kitchen. 😅
Those sort of talks used to be more fact based but in the past 20 years they have gone far more political biased and outright lying about the science and facts to push some agenda they have. Either they make money for pushing these lies (investments from Blackrock and other DEI financial institutions) or some political favors (Democrats voting against regulations that would adverssely effect them) or some other thing.
The bias is real and we the people must reject this and hold them all accountable for their lies. Its ok to be wrong about conclusions if you are honestly trying and get a projection wrong. But it is not acceptable if you base your projections off of a political or personal bias.
It is good to bring up the topic of the broken 'publish or perish' system at universities. You must publish papers to stay employed, the only papers that get published are ones where you find a result, find something new. As you have no power over finding a result, that is essentially random, you are instead incentivized by your employer to influence what you can control, which is creating the appearance of finding a result. So long as the system pivots around a factor that professors cannot control, they will be encouraged to cheat as cheating or luck are the only two things that will keep them employed.
Extremely swell stated, @installfunandgames!
Same problem exists in industry in a different way. You get handed projects to work on, and maybe that project works out and makes the company a lot of money, or maybe it fails. Whether or not it succeeds has very little to do with the people running the project, usually. For example one analytical development project I had in the pharmaceutical industry -- product failed in formulation and was likely impossible from the get-go under the constraints the company had to operate by. But it was still 18 months of effort from me on the analytical side that yielded me zero that I could report as an accomplishment in performance reviews, or for promotion, or on my resume for other jobs.
Marketing matters more than anything.
I'm honestly shocked. The ripple effect those papers had and will continue to have cannot be undone. Wow.
All data post 1950 is fake
this was easily caught when examined. how many more aren't?
Im amazed at just HOW doctored this data was. I feel like my community college instructors would have clocked faked data this blatant.
That's because they're paid to check your work. No one is really paid to check published works like that. It would in fact be detriment to both the journals and universities.
@UnusuallyLargeCrab - I went back and checked your original post before you commented, and it read ‘would have *_choked fake cola_* this blatant.’
Hmmm. p< 0.05 Eh ?!
Right?! That's by far the biggest suprise to me. Reduce the significance and bit and santatize the file I bet there would be 0 proof, but they couldn't even be assed to do that
Peer reviewers don't check data and calculations. It is much more about checking descriptive language, methodology, equations, and conclusions.
The details are be checked by others post-publication. Being retracted is an academic's worst fear. That fear is what keeps most academics honest.
This has been a problem for decades. Alfred Kinseys data was well known to be of poor quality, and he used bad reasoning to extrapolate prison data and misrepresented it as representing the general population.
He also used data of nonces touching kids to prove that kids had a sexuality. Kinsey was such a scandal, it's interesting to see him celebrated in modern culture
Whoa there. That's the God of transgenderism you're talking about. You can't do that. Everybody knows that gender ideology is above criticism and scrutiny.
thats like john money who lied about being able to change your identity. it was all a lie while he went around lecturing on the subject using falsified data and now look what we have.
Comment section did not disappoint 👌🏻❤
Then there's the Lindsay, Pluckrose (and some third researcher) scandal where they purposefully submitted bad research just to show how stupidly easy it is to push bad data into journals despite all of the supposed "peer-review" that should be weeding out all the bad research.
Results without honesty is pointless work.