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.