Behavioral scientist Francesca Gino has filed a lawsuit against three scientists who the blog Data Colada operated and against Harvard University, where she holds a professorship. Gino is seeking a total of $25 million in damages for alleged damage to his reputation. She accuses the operators of Data Colada of spreading false claims about her and her work and of running a “malicious, defamatory smear campaign” against her. She accuses her university of proceeding “excessively” in an internal investigation and yet not having presented any significant evidence of the alleged falsification or manipulation of data. That reports The Chronicle of Higher Education in a comprehensive post.
Gino is accused of manipulating data for several studies. Among them is a work on the subject of honesty, in which the behavioral scientist Dan Ariely from Duke University was also involved, who is also accused – independently of Gino – of having falsified data for his part. The 2012 in the journal PNAS published study has long since retired. Two other studies by Gino have already been withdrawn from the journals. A fourth work is apparently about to be withdrawn. Gino emphasized on the social network LinkedInshe never falsified data or was guilty of scientific misconduct.
The lawyer states that the raw data is no longer available
The researcher has been on two-year administrative leave since June 13 from her position at Harvard University. The university had previously investigated allegations against Gino that she was said to have falsified data. The researcher now argues that she was not given sufficient time to respond to the allegations in the report. The university had given her three weeks to do it. The allegations against them are also not sufficiently proven, according to Gino’s argument. Besides, she rated, so The Chronicle of Higher Educationdescribed the case as another attack on prominent women in science, stressing that she is the mother of four and the breadwinner of her family.
The allegations and the Harvard University investigation against Gino had started after a replication of the 2012 study, which she and Ariely were involved in, had failed. At that time, uninvolved researchers noticed anomalies in the raw data, which they then examined further. the authors of posts on the blog Data Colada – Leif Nelson from the University of California at Berkeley, Uri Simonsohn from the Esade Business School and Joe Simmons from the University of Pennsylvania – then submitted their analysis to Harvard University in the fall of 2021. The blog authors argued that the data showed odd distributions, data appeared to have been swapped or altered between test groups, and parts of the raw data did not match those later published.
Some of the journals in which the now withdrawn studies had been published, as well as the Harvard University report, apparently came to the same or at least similar conclusions. Loud The Chronicle of Higher Education Harvard University attorney Ginos said the raw data for the affected studies from 2012, 2014 and 2015 is no longer available because data older than six years does not need to be retained.