UCLA professor refuses to cover for Dan Ariely in issue of data provenance
Summary for those who are not deep into academia…<p>Dan Ariely is a fraud.  To be specific: he has been credibly accused of fabricating data in at least four separate studies (Ten Commandments, delta dental, Hartford car insurance, and the study which he claimed Rossi ran for him which is discussed at the link).  There are likely more.<p>More broadly: There was a “golden age” for this kind of “behavioral economics”&#x2F;social psychology work in the early 2000’s up to probably 2012-2015.<p>Researchers would generally publish “results” which were either “delightfully counterintuitive” (ex: prime subjects to think about Florida and they walk slowly) OR featured extremely cheap interventions which showed large effects on outcomes (ex: signing an honest pledge at the top or the bottom of the page made a big difference in how honest people actually were on their tasks).<p>In retrospect, there are two problems (at least!) with this literature.<p>1.  There was no theory backing up any of these predictions, so you could rationalize <i>any</i> statistically significant result with a compelling story.  Publish it and you’re on your way to tenure.<p>2.  Related to (1.), you didn’t even need to bother running actual experiments at all!  Just fabricate the data.    Make it fit your cute story and you’re done.<p>There are many tenured people in business schools (generally in “organizational behavior” or “social psychology” style departments rather than Econ) who were tenured on the basis of papers published under (1.) or (2.).<p>This is a big shame because there <i>are</i> serious researchers who do difficult work in behavioral and experimental economics which is _not at all_ like this BS.  (Some are personal friends of mine, so this bothers me.).<p>There was no incentive for about 15 years to do the hard work though.  And given that tenure is for life, it’ll be a long long time before these people are flushed out (barring more investigations, which should be encouraged!).<p>What should you do?<p>- be extremely, extremely skeptical of <i>any</i> results in the “priming” literature (eg the “think of Florida” example above).<p>- be moderately skeptical of results in the “nudges” literature.  The retirement savings stuff makes sense and has replicated but the honesty nudge above is BS and has not.<p>- don’t get really excited about a researcher who says “economics bad - people dumb! - I behavioralist!”  More than a few of these people have been revealed to be total frauds.<p>- don’t click or share this stuff when you see it on Reddit, HN or anywhere else.  That kind of engagement “feeds the beast” - Deans love it and Deans assume you haven’t fabricated your data.<p>- maybe if you are specifically a Duke or Duke Fuqua alum send them a note asking why they aren’t taking the Ariely misconduct more seriously???<p>-  (edit) throw away your copies of any of Ariely’s books.  They are BS.