Celebrated Harvard behavioral scientist Francesca Gino, whose papers and studies on honesty garnered her accolades from the press and several awards, is being sued by Harvard for defamation after she was found to have "cooked the books" on four separate studies to "prove" her hypothesis. Harvard fired Gino and revoked her tenure.
The drama began in 2021 when three behavioral scientists published a series of blog posts on the site Data Colada, accusing Gino of falsifying data in four studies published between 2012 and 2020.
One of the studies she co-authored claimed that "requiring individuals to sign an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form, rather than at the end, significantly boosts honest responses," reported the New York Post. The study was retracted in 2021, and an investigation of Gino's work began.
The investigation examined not only Gino's work but also the work of research assistants. Harvard Business School also reviewed and analyzed her data, emails, and paper manuscripts.
An outside forensics team was also hired to examine her work. They rejected Gino's claim that the data problems were the result of others' mistakes and provided their report to the Harvard Business School dean. The school placed Gino on unpaid leave and began termination proceedings.
“There is one thing I know for sure: I did not commit academic fraud. I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result,” Gino wrote on her website.
“I did not falsify data to bolster any result. I did not commit the offense I am accused of. Period.”
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Gino's saga was far from over.
She sued Harvard, alleging the school did not examine evidence that exonerated her. The "evidence" was contained in datasets on which she says she based her paper.
Alas, the honesty professor was telling another lie.
The next year, as HBS [Harvard Business School] pursued an investigation into her tenure status, Gino alleged the school had botched its extraction of material from her laptop, according to Harvard’s counterclaim. She told Harvard that she had hired a “proper forensic expert” to copy the materials on her laptop in January 2024, and she subsequently turned over a partially redacted version of the copy to HBS, according to the counterclaim.
When HBS’s research integrity officer examined the copy, he found that the July 17 dataset was gone, replaced by a file with the same name — but different contents, according to Harvard’s complaint. The new file was formatted like raw data but instead contained the OSF dataset, Harvard alleged.
HBS determined that the file was last saved on Sept. 23, 2023, but had been intentionally backdated to appear as if it was last modified on July 17, 2010.
Harvard's suit against Gino goes into detail about the fake dataset. “Upon information and belief, the 2023 Cover-Up File represents an abortive attempt by Professor Gino to intentionally manufacture evidence that would appear to exonerate her, which she later planned to and did disclose as the ‘July 16 OG file,’” Harvard attorneys wrote.
According to Harvard's complaint, Gino refused to turn over the MacOS Terminal logs that the school believes "would show how she had manipulated metadata to backdate the file," reports the Crimson.
"Gino also removed her fall 2023 blog post describing the 'July 16 OG file' after being contacted by Harvard about the discrepancies," the student paper claims.
The (dis)honesty professor should have learned how to lie better. Instead, she presented a botched effort at data manipulation, an attempted cover-up that went sideways, and claims of "sexism" and violations of Title IX that no one believed.
Harvard had not yanked any professor's tenure since the 1940's. In Gino's case, it was well justified.
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