Re:UCLA Professor Refuses to Cover for Dan Ariely in Issue o...
by jcranmer on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @05:06PM
(#36687222)
> He'd already done lab experiments that showed the effect he thought existed, and it's easy to imagine the associate at the company knew what he was looking to confirm.
Based on Bazerman's response, actually, he hadn't:
> [The fradulent paper] came together in a merger of two prior non-published empirical efforts. Mazar-Ariely independently provided the data for Study 3, while Shu-Gino-Bazerman had written a paper containing two laboratory experiments (Studies 1 and 2). The Shu-Gino-Bazerman group knew of the Mazar-Ariely data from multiple public presentations by Ariely.
He'd already done lab experiments that showed the effect he thought existed, and it's easy to imagine an associate who actually fabricated the data already knew what he was looking to confirm.
Again, I'm not saying I think he's guilty or not. I'm just saying that from everything I've read so far, it seems plausible it was sloppiness and not checking data for signs of manipulation. That this sloppiness isn't "beyond absurd", but rather more like the classic "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (or by an overworked/overambitious academic).