Academic co-authors of famous study about honesty now shown to contain fake data still think it OK how remarkably uninvolved they were in it

This is how it works. It's about credentialism and arguments from authority, not about "science". Academia is rife with this sort of thing. Today's academics are as phony as the medieval clerisy ever was.

 

Renowned psychologist Dan Ariely literally wrote the book on dishonesty. Now some are questioning whether the scientist himself is being dishonest:

... four of the five authors said they played no part in collecting the data for the test in question.

That leaves Ariely, who confirmed that he alone was in touch with the insurance company that ran the test with its customers and provided him with the data. But he insisted that he was innocent, implying it was the company that was responsible. ...

Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor and one of the authors, wrote, “I was not involved in conversations with the insurance company that conducted the field experiment, nor in any of the steps of running it or analyzing the data.”

Another author, Nina Mazar, then at the University of Toronto and now a marketing professor at Boston University, told the blog, “I want to make clear that I was not involved in conducting the field study, had no interactions with the insurance company, and don’t know when, how, or by whom exactly the data was collected and entered. I have no knowledge of who fabricated the data.”

Gino declined to be interviewed for this story, and Mazar did not return a request for comment. ...

Bazerman of Harvard ... had questions about the insurance experiment’s seemingly “implausible data.” A coauthor assured him the data were accurate and another showed him the file, though he admitted that he did not personally examine it. When the 2012 paper made waves, he “then believed the core result” and taught it to students and corporate executives alike. In retrospect, he wrote, “I wish I had worked harder to identify the data were fraudulent, to ensure rigorous research in a collaborative context, and to promptly retract the 2012 paper.”

Shu, another coauthor who now works in venture capital, voiced similar regrets on Twitter this week. “We began our collaboration from a place of assumed trust — rather than earned trust,” she wrote. “Lesson learned.” She declined to comment for this story.

At best only 30% of us cannot tell a lie, but the regular preaching of the law nips it in the bud for the rest

So says surprising new research, reported here:

'But there is an extremely simple way to curb dishonesty dramatically — just remind people to not be dishonest. All you have to do is show people some kind of reminder of a moral code, and the urge to lie dissipates. In one experiment Ariely describes, researchers asked 500 students at UCLA to try to jot down as many of the Ten Commandments that they could remember. After that, they took part in the matrix experiment. None of them recalled all the commandments, and yet none of them cheated, Ariely said. This was true regardless of whether the students were religious or not. Simply reminding them that Thou shall not lie has a weirdly powerful effect. 

'The study was replicated at MIT, but without the religious context: Students were asked to read MIT’s “moral code” before the matrix task. Again, no one cheated, Ariely said — this, despite the fact that MIT doesn’t even have a moral code. “It is not about heaven and hell and being caught,” Ariely said. “It’s about reminding ourselves about our own moral fiber.”'

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Lutheran theology famously speaks of the law as a curb, a mirror and a guide (Riegel, Spiegel, Zuegel). It keeps society in check, shows us our failings when we see ourselves as we truly are, and directs those who are domesticated by it on their way. It is the first of these which is confirmed by the matrix experiment, and argues for the reintroduction of the Ten Commandments in American life.