It's fairly fascinating. The story it builds up to is: did the professor of focus start a big working group that examined everyone's research quality including her own, generating a lot of "I don't know how this happened but it's wrong and should be retracted and I take responsibility" mea culpas, in order to conceal that she had consciously falsified the data (as many others almost certainly were)?
I can't help but notice the cumulative focus on female researchers across these reports, though. First Gino (admittedly she fed it by making a high-drama lawsuit against Harvard), now Schroeder, while, say, Ariely seems to get less focus consistently (he has had entire articles about him though).
The most interesting bit is this:
Their research doesn't typically aim to solve a social problem; it won't be curing anyone's disease. It doesn't even seem to have much influence on business practices, and it certainly hasn't shaped the nation's commerce. Still, its flashy findings come with clear rewards: consulting gigs and speakers' fees, not to mention lavish academic incomes.
It might be best to look at the field not as a branch of scholarship but as a branch of the entertainment industry, much as pro wrestling is not an athletic pursuit. In which case, does it matter whether its findings hold up?
I mean, it is definitely not the most malicious, destructive misinformation out there at the moment. But I'm not feeling too kindly towards any misinformation parading as fact.
It's a good article, and the suspenseful narrative framing is engaging. I do think this is one of the least surprising outcomes of the whole replication crisis (of which it is indeed a part). If there's anywhere that I would expect to find pervasive outright research fraud it's the business schools.
I also have a kind of "who cares?" reaction to the anguished tone when it comes to her motivations. It sounds like she did a ton of work to uncover fraudulent research, including her own. That's way more than the vast majority of people in academia have done or are likely to do. If it came from a guilty conscience or an attempt to misdirect from her own actions, fine.
2: it's fascinating that you should bring up pro wrestling in the context of education...
Recently discovered that I accidentally let a free trial of speechify lapse into an actual paid subscription. I did not intentionally pay this much money for this ability at all but I'm stuck with it now. I just used it for the first time on this article with Snoop Dogg and while I do not recommend paying almost $100 for the ability to listen to Snoop Dogg read this article -- it is still absolutely fantastic.
The lies start from the beginning- the researchers pretend that they chose "Don't Stop Believing" as the karaoke because it's well-known and can be sung by both men and women when anyone with half a brain can see they chose it because it would make a good title for their article.
Also it's still proudly displayed on the Harvard Business School website without any disclaimer -- https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=51401
That was well written in that it made me much more invested in the study and Schroeder's psychology than so thought zinwould be. ( Or maybe Snoop did it. ) I am almost imagining a novel about the mysterious RAs and the interpersonal dynamics between them and Schroeder.
That was well written in that it made me much more invested in the study and Schroeder's psychology than so thought zinwould be. ( Or maybe Snoop did it. ) I am almost imagining a novel about the mysterious RAs and the interpersonal dynamics between them and Schroeder.
I wish someone had told me a decade ago when I was picking jobs to avoid places with a big business school. Just a pernicious influence on every aspect of the university.
My heuristic is that the flashier the social science headline, the more likely it is to be utter nonsense.
But one of the women I respect most on this campus is one of these business psychologists. Hmmm.
8: Another flaw in the study was that they didn't consider the possibility that the salt did actually have magical powers.
13: And who knows? The horse may learn to sing.
Wow, I can't believe a journalist found a new way to hash over the Francesa Gino fallout. He made it work, I'll give him that. He's a good science journalist.
No doubt the high powered incentives of consulting & guru status can have a warping effect on research. But I think it's worth saying that Ariely and Gino were pretty unusual in going straight from research to popular stories. If you look at lists of popular business "influencers", most aren't sitting in business schools. And those that are from academia are a hop, skip, and a jump from any academic research they did.
Which is to say, (from my vantage point in a business school) my prediction would be that the replication failure rate would be indistinguishable across social science and professional schools. Everyone wants to get published and promoted. And everyone wants to have a surprising result even if, as Cala says, those are most likely to be false positives.
I would also predict that the size of the deliberate fraud effect is actually small compared to the replication failures due to psychological bias towards significance and surprise (what Andrew Gelman calls "the garden of forking paths"). Though the fraudulent findings probably have more media prominence because they can be shaded toward attractiveness, the way false memes travel faster than true ones.
Gino's absolutelly unforgivable sin suing the Data Colada academics who exposed her. That is a classic harrassment lawsuit and shows how deeply she doesn't give a shit about truth or science.
I was reading a lot of it thinking about how Excel is wonderful for noodling around in and surprisingly bad for change control and validation/verification. I find it easy to imagine someone who's only slightly sloppy about methods keeping the copy of the spreadsheet with the really great graph and only sort of knowing it was bad science.
Basically, " psychological bias towards significance and surprise", with extra snarking at Excel, because its considerable virtues are so hard to detach from its dangers.
Because I do not rule the world, I have to deal with data stored in Excel. It's a nightmare. The joke about Excel/Incel/"Thinks this is a date" isn't actually that funny so much as a real horror.
Biologists have renamed at least one gene (March1) because it was so often misrepresented in data files due to Excel. Microsoft is more powerful than genetics.
At least use .csv files. You can read those into SAS and then work like a normal human.
I would also like people to stick to 8 character variables names out of respect for the old ways.
I would also like people to stick to 8 character variables names out of respect for the old ways.
I've got to part ways with you here, old man. We need more names that actually say what the variable is.
The one actual effect I've had supervising a small team is to rationalize people's file names for documents.
I may not actually stick to 8 characters for everything.