An important finding is buried in the linked blog post. It turns out that Ariely was hyping the fraudulent findings on NPR in February 2020. At the time, perhaps he didn't know that they were fraudulent. But he -did- know that there was great reason to doubt them. We can be confident of this point because, more than half a year earlier, he had submitted for publication a new article [1] that (a) failed to replicate the original findings, and (b) uncovered a massive problem with baseline measurements in the original study, suggesting that the randomization in that study might never even have taken place. Indeed, the whole point of the new article was to make these critical points about the older article!

Even if Ariely had no role in the creation of the fake data, it seems hard to defend his behavior on NPR: hyping a study that he knew to be extremely problematic.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/13/7103.short