A Harvard professor who researches dishonesty is now on administrative leave following allegations of data fraud. Monetary / career incentives seem to do little to predict faking data.

Francesca Gino is another researcher of morality who has had papers retracted because their data was simply made up.

The techniques that behavioural scientists used to uncover the fraud are ingenious and make an excellent story. That story is best told by the detectives themselves: [111] Data Falsificada (Part 3): “The Cheaters Are Out of Order” – Data Colada

This case impressed two thoughts on my mind:

A disproportionate number of cases of academic fraud in the behavioural sciences happen to have been exposed in experimental research on moral decision making. These are the relevant papers with author responsible for fraudulant data listed in bold:

1. Diederik Stapel & Siegwart Lindenberg, S. (2011). “Coping with Chaos: How Disordered Contexts Promote Stereotyping and Discrimination”. [Retracted article]. Science. 332 (6026): 251–253
2. Lawrence Sanna et al. (2011) Rising up to higher virtues: Experiencing elevated physical height uplifts prosocial actions [Retracted article]. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 472–476
3. Liu, Jia, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Dirk Smeesters. “RETRACTED: Money and Mimicry: When Being Mimicked Makes People Feel Threatened.” Psychological Science 22.9 (2011): 1150-1151.
4. Shu, Lisa L., Nina Mazar, Francesca Gino, Dan Ariely, and Max H. Bazerman. “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 38 (2012): 15197-15200.
5. Gino, Francesca, and Scott S. Wiltermuth. “Evil genius? How dishonesty can lead to greater creativity.” Psychological Science 25, no. 4 (2014): 973-981.

The second thought is that material incentives seem to play very little role in motivating dishonest behaviour. Nor does a guranteed job for life (i.e. tenure) reduce the likelihood of engaging in fraud. All of the authors listed in bold above were tenured professors at elite universities when they wrote the paper that was found to be fraudulent. The impact of an additional publication on their prospects would have been negligable. This is especially true of Francesca Gino, who is at the apex of the academic hierarchy – a Harvard prof who is editor of a top business journal.

So what explains fraud? Is it a predisposition? Or is it a habit?