(2021-08-21) A Big Study About Honesty Turns Out To Be Based On Fake Data

A Big Study About Honesty Turns Out To Be Based On Fake Data. A landmark study that endorsed a simple way to curb cheating is going to be retracted nearly a decade later after a group of scientists found that it relied on faked data. According to the 2012 paper, when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than the end, they were less likely to lie... The paper also bolstered the reputations of two of its authors — Max Bazerman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, a psychologist and behavioral economist at Duke University — as leaders in the study of decision-making, irrationality, and unethical behavior.

Ariely, a frequent TED Talk speaker and a Wall Street Journal advice columnist, cited the study in lectures and in his New York Times bestseller The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves.

One of its main experiments was faked “beyond any shadow of a doubt,” three academics wrote in a post on their blog, Data Colada, on Tuesday.

it’s still unclear who made up the data or why — and four of the five authors said they played no part in collecting the data for the test in question.

That leaves Ariely, who confirmed that he alone was in touch with the insurance company that ran the test with its customers and provided him with the data. But he insisted that he was innocent, implying it was the company that was responsible

But Ariely gave conflicting answers about the origins of the data file that was the basis for the analysis.

And this is not the first time questions have been raised about Ariely’s research in particular.

fit neatly into a growing body of research about “nudging”

Ariely went on to join the millennial-focused insurance startup Lemonade as chief behavioral officer.

A few other researchers had been unsuccessfully trying to replicate and build upon some of the experiments, so they joined forces with the five original scientists, including Ariely, to run one of those tests again.

Looking back on the original mileage-reporting experiment, the researchers realized that the two groups — the top and bottom signers — had significantly different mileage records to begin with. Honesty likely had nothing to do with the differences between their responses,

Poring through the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, Simmons and the other data detectives unearthed a series of implausible anomalies that pointed to at least two kinds of fabrication: Many of the baseline, preexperiment mileages appeared to be duplicated and slightly altered, and all the mileages supposedly collected during the forms test looked like they were made up.

Almost exactly half of the mileages in the baseline data were entered in the font Calibri and the other half in Cambria. The two sets were “impossibly similar,

Another oddity: almost none of the mileages in Ariely’s forms experiment were rounded. That was strange because these were supposedly self-reported, and it would be expected that many drivers would give ballpark estimates rather than looking up the exact figures on their odometers.