Science : Researcher committed academic fraud on papers about honesty

Researcher committed academic fraud on papers about honesty

https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2021/08/duke-university-dan-ariely-fraudulent-data-colada-research-2012-2004-economics-psychology-statistics
An analysis on a research blog site suggests that a famous Duke professor and researcher could have committed academic fraud.

Dan Ariely, James B. Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics, has had at least two of his works come under scrutiny in recent weeks due to ambiguous or potentially fraudulent data.
Data Colada also published an analysis in August questioning the results of a 2012 paper where Ariely was one of five authors. The 2012 paper reported that “dishonesty can be reduced by asking people to sign a statement of honest intent before providing information (i.e., at the top of a document) rather than after providing information (i.e., at the bottom of a document).”

In 2020, the five authors and two others published a follow-up article entitled “Signing at the beginning versus the end does not decrease dishonesty.” The paper reported six studies that did not replicate the two original lab studies, one of which was an attempt to directly replicate the study and the other five of which were conceptual replications.
I read one of this guy's books. It was probably all bullshit. Psychology is an almost entirely fraudulent field of study, especially social psychology and behavioral economics. At least half the studies don't replicate.

Re: Researcher committed academic fraud on papers about honesty

Most published studies are said to be false… according to a published study.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Findings_Are_False

In the paper, Ioannidis argued that a large number, if not the majority, of published medical research papers contain results that cannot be replicated. In simple terms, the essay states that scientists use hypothesis testing to determine whether scientific discoveries are significant. "Significance" is formalized in terms of probability and one formalized calculation ("P value") is reported in the scientific literature as a screening mechanism. Ioannidis posited assumptions about the way people perform and report these tests and then he constructed a statistical model which indicates that most published findings are false positive results.

Re: Researcher committed academic fraud on papers about honesty

That only covers medical research. Those studies are often junk because to do actually accurate medical research you need to know the genome of the subjects and their environments, like what they eat, how much they exercise, sleep, any toxins or stressors they are exposed to, because it all interacts in ways unique to individuals that gets lost when you only consider broad categories like age or sex or race. The same is true for nutritional science.

I remember now another book I read from a different researcher, Marc Hauser, a biologist but one primarily interested in how the mind works. It later turned out that he was guilty of academic fraud or scientific misconduct and had to leave the field.
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