Top Honesty Researcher, Dan Ariely, Has Paper Retracted Due to Fraudulent Data

Today, truth is on my mind after I read the following quote:

"(T)ruth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie."–Miyamoto Musashi

This reminded me of this, my favorite, quote about truth: 

“When truth is buried underground it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.”–Emile Zola

Over the years, I've found the latter quote to be very descriptive of the events that follow after the initial revelations that a fraud has taken place. For example, the explosion of truth that happened after Lance Armstrong was first accused by his former teammate, Floyd Landis, of doping. A few years later and Lance had been stripped of all his yellow jerseys and all sorts of revelations came out that exposed truth that was buried deep in the ground in hopes that it would never be revealed (this link chronicles about 150 blog posts about Lance's fraud coming to light).

Similarly, in accounting research, we had a researcher who, by many accounts, was considered accounting's most prolific academic, Jim Hunton, have a paper (ironically on auditor's detection of fraud) retracted in November 2012. Many of Professor Hunton's papers contained what he claimed was proprietary data that was obtained from confidential sources. A few years later, 37 of Jim Hunton's papers had been retracted (technically, 36.5 since one paper was partially retracted). He is currently listed as #14 on the RetractionWatch leaderboard (see this link for more information).

Over the past few days, a 2012 paper coauthored by someone who is arguably the most prolific psychology researcher on (ironically) honesty, Dan Ariely, was identified as containing fraudulent data and is being retracted (see this link for details on the investigation that led to the retraction; see this Twitter thread saying it is being retracted and giving other interesting context from one of the coauthors). Unfortunately, like Jim Hunton, Professor Ariely was in charge of the data and claims to have obtained it from a proprietary source. While it is too early to tell, this begs the question of what the future holds. Is this the early rumblings of the truth trying to free itself from its casket buried deep in the earth?

Sadly, I have had some suspicions about some experiments that Professor Ariely ran using a shredder that was modified so it looked like it was shredding but really wasn't (see this link for more details). After purchasing several shredders in an attempt to modify them so we could do what he claimed he did and even getting a BYU engineering student who was the lead TA in the Mechanical Engineering lab involved in the effort, we emailed Professor Ariely to ask him how he did it. He provided a voicemail response that was not satisfactory. He claimed it was "quite simple" to convert a shredder by breaking the teeth in the middle with a screwdriver but that he doesn't use that method any longer. (My TA found the file with Dr. Ariely's explanation; click this link if you want to hear it.)

(The photo on the left is one of the shredders we tried to modify. I'm confident that those teeth could not be broken with a screwdriver.) 

We were unable to break any teeth on the shredders we purchased but ended up finding a way to remove some of the teeth in the center by taking the shredder apart. Unfortunately, when we did this the papers would no longer go through the shredder without getting turned to one side or another and they inevitably got stuck because the shredder no longer had enough teeth to pull them through. We concluded that it was impossible to modify any of the shredders we bought and I filed the entire experience in my mind by putting an asterisk next to Dan Ariely's name as someone who made a claim regarding his research that seems potentially suspicious.

Time will tell whether this retraction is the rumblings of a massive explosion or not. If there are other implications, I hope the truth comes out because, I believe, the world is always a better place when fraud has been exposed.

Detecting Fraud in Academic Research

The scientific community is often considered to be less filled with fraud than other disciplines. Typically when we think of fraud, we think of it occurring in businesses and think of someone walking away with a lot of money. However, fraud can also easily happen in academic research (see these previous posts for examples) where someone walks away with a lot of published papers. Discover Magazine recently posted an article titled The Perfect Scientific Crime. The article outlines several ways that someone could commit fraud without being detected by creating and using fictitious data. The purpose of the article, however, is not to help fraudsters, but rather to point out a few things that others should be aware of to help deter fraud in the academic community.

Competitive Sports Leads to Academic Fraud at UNC

A report was recently released with findings of an investigation on academic fraud at the University of North Carolina. The report states that an office administrator, Deborah Crowder, established fake classes where students weren’t expected to do anything except submit a paper. The classes became known as “paper classes.” The investigative report revealed that “when Crowder graded the papers, she did so generously – typically with A’s or high B’s – and largely without regard to the quality of the papers.” A majority of the students enrolled in the “class” were student athletes (mainly football and basketball players) who needed a good grade to remain eligible to compete in their respective sport. Just like the frauds we have seen in cycling, competitive sports seems to have yet again created the perfect environment for fraud to occur, and it wasn’t just one person who knew about it.