Dishonesty among Honesty Researchers

Until recently, one of the most influential articles on the empirical psychology of honesty was Shu, Mazar, Gino, Ariely, and Bazerman 2012, which purported to show, across three studies, that people who sign honesty pledges at the beginning of a process in which dishonesty is possible will be much more honest than those who sign at the end of the process. The result is intuitive (if you sign before doing a task, that might change your behavior in a way that signing after wouldn't), and it suggests straightforward, practical interventions: Have students, customers, employees, etc., sign honesty pledges before occasions in which they might be tempted to cheat.

Unfortunately, there appear to have been not just one but two separate instances of fraud in this study, and the results appear not to replicate in an honest (presumably), preregistered replication attempt.

The first fraud was revealed in 2021, and concerned customers' honest or dishonest reporting of mileage to an insurance company. The data appear to have been largely fabricated, either by Ariely or by whoever supplied him the data; none of the other collaborators are implicated.

The second fraud was revealed last week, and appears to be entirely separate, involving multiple papers by Gino, including Study 1 in the already-retracted Shu et al. 2012. In Shu et al., Study 1, participants could receive financial advantage by overreporting travel expenses or how many math puzzles they had solved earlier in the experiment, and purportedly there was less overreporting if participants signed an honesty pledge first. Several participants' results appear to have been strategically shifted from one condition to another to produce the reported effect. In light of an apparent pattern of fraud across several papers, Harvard has put Gino on administrative leave.

Yes, two apparently unrelated instances of fraud, by different researchers, on the very same famous article about honesty.

[some of the evidence of fraud, from https://datacolada.org/109]

For those who follow such news, Gino's case might bring to mind another notorious case of fraud by a Harvard psychologist: In 2010, Marc Hauser, was found to have faked and altered data in his work on rule-learning in monkeys (e.g., here) and subsequently resigned his academic post.

I have three observations:

First, Gino, Ariely, and Hauser are (or were) three of the most prominent moral psychologists in the world. Although Hauser's discovered fraud concerned monkey rule-learning, he was probably as well known for his work on moral cognition, which culminated in his 2006 book Moral Minds. This is a high rate of discovered fraud among leading moral psychology researchers, especially if we assume that most fraud goes undiscovered. I am struck by the parallel to my series of papers on the moral behavior of ethicists (overview here). Ethicists, and apparently also moral psychologists, appear to behave no better on average than socially similar people who don't study morality.

One might think that ethics and moral psychology would either (a.) tend to draw people particularly interested in advancing ethical ends (for example, particularly attuned to the importance of honesty) and thus presumably personally more ethical than average or (b.) at least make ethics personally more salient for them and thus presumably motivationally stronger. Either neither (a) nor (b) are true or studying ethics and moral psychology also has some countervailing negative effect.

Second, around the time of the discovery of his fraud, Hauser was working on a book titled Evilicious, concerning humans' widespread appetite for behaving immorally, and similarly Gino recently published a book titled Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life. The titles perhaps speak for themselves: Part of studying moral psychology is studying bad moral psychology. (The "rebels" Gino celebrates might not be breaking moral rules -- celebrating that might impair sales and lucrative speaking gigs -- but the idea does appear to generalize.)

Third, the first and second observation suggest a mechanism by which the study of ethics and moral psychology can negatively affect the ethics of the researcher. If people mostly aim -- as I think they do -- toward moral mediocrity, that is, not to be good or bad by absolute standards but rather to be about as morally good as their peers, then if your opinion about what is common changes, your own behavior will tend to change accordingly to match. The more you study the worst side of humanity, the more you can think to yourself "well, even if X is bad, it's not as bad as all that, and people do X all the time". If you study dishonesty, you might be struck by the thought that dishonesty is everywhere -- and then if you are tempted to be dishonest you might think, "well, everyone else is doing it". I can easily imagine someone in Gino's position thinking, probably most researchers have from time to time shifted around a few rows of data to make their results pop out better. Is it really so bad if I do it too? And then once the deed has been done, it probably becomes easier, for multiple reasons, to assume that such fraud is widespread and just part of the usual academic game (grounds for thinking this might include rationalization, positive self-illusion, and using oneself as a model for thinking about others).

I do still think and hope that fraud is very much the exception. In interacting with dozens of researchers over the years and working through a variety of raw datasets, I've seen some shaky methodology and maybe a few instances of unintentional p-hacking; but I have never witnessed, suspected, seen signs of, or heard any suggestion of outright fraud or data alteration.