The Fall of a Leading Behavioural Scientist 

Thank you all for the amazing feedback, keep it coming! UPDATE: Francesca's rebuttal to the claims: www.francesca-v-harvard.org/ I heart comments I have seen, and reply to those RU-vid notifies me off. FEEDBACK: - We hear you about the animation - TOO MUCH. - Apologies for my pronunciation, I should have searched how to say the university. My bad. Lesson learned. - Do more spell checking. KEY COMMENTS: - Journal reviewers should be paid - Critics should also have critics - 'Hard sciences' are not the same - with rebuttals claiming the contrary - Peer review should be double blind - Academics should focus on lecturing not just publishing @fridavinci6177

She tries to financially destroy the 3 investigators who caught her fraud. This is as criminal as an armed robbery. She should be made an example for hijacking the legal system to attack the investigators with a spurious lawsuit.

I used to work at a prestigious Cancer research Institute. One of the very “successful” researchers would always ask his technicians to give him all the control data so he could select which one to use!!

Is it just me or RU-vid algorithm is giving small creators a chance? Anyways nice video, though you could reduce splashing animation and make it like readable for second.

The bigger question is… how Common is this misconduct in our academic institutions?

Harvard has some integrity problem: Within 13 years, it involved economics and history. Now the problem can involve psychology.

The real issue is that reviewers for journals are not paid. They only point out issues assuming the data analysis was handled correctly. It is unreasonable for an unpaid reviewer to spend tens of hours combing through data and replicating parts of the study when they are unpaid and have their own work to deal with. Pay them and make this a requirement.

Makes me think of Goodhart's Law (and the 'That every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure' version due to Hoskins). There are metrics to measure 'researcher productivity', and researchers are pressured to appear good with respect to these measures, and so there is temptation to game those measures: produce more papers with more significant results in less time.

This is a great video; tone down the animations in future videos and you have the ingredients for a growing RU-vid channel :)

She is one crystallized example of the entire academic infrastructure. It's been lost.

*Break the Rules* [1:35] "How did she (Gino) fall, and fall so far?" Seems like a pretty self answering question. Gino's scientific obsession with decision making and rule breaking seems to have crossed over into her personal and professional conduct. Drank her own Cool-Aid? Gino's problem with such a successful and remunerative strategy is that the validity of her work, career and profession are almost wholly dependent upon everyone else trusting implicitly that she is following the rules.

What she did was par for the course in academia. The only unusual aspects are that she focused so much on the topic of dishonesty-fittingly or ironically, I can't decide-and that she was a superstar academic seeking the limelight, which is poor strategery when you've been fudging all your data. I doubt she'll have any success in her lawsuits given harvard and data colada had independently arrived at the conclusion she was faking her data; on its face it shows there was plenty suspect in her research, so her best bet is to suggest there's a big conspiracy between one of the most prestigious educational institutes in the world and three random bloggers. I wish her all the worst luck in her future endeavors.

I'm sorry, but "Carnage Mellon University" cracked me up. Good overall though!

The idea that original research has any kind of standing has to be dispensed with. Such research papers, when finalized, should then be submitted for verification, with all the necessary detail to allow other teams to exactly copy the experiments. When reproduceable results have been achieved, you get to "publish" your work as something of meaningful value to the field of study, with extensive explanations contributed by the other teams of what they thought about experiment and the conclusions. That is much closer to the scientific method than just "have 2 friends look at it and give an OK". Which is just a guild protecting its own.

The vast majority of people in psychology actually provide clinical services and work with people. Then there are people who study psychiatry and psychology and behavioral science, and then there are a subset of people who study absurd constructs and attempt to create gigantic arguments about human behavior on the basis of a questionnaire administered to college students. University departments tend to value the last type of researcher far more than people who do clinical work. I can think of nothing more trivial or random than her study about weather and honesty pledge be at the top or bottom of the page. But that is literally the kind of BS that these clinical psych people use as the basis for their larger arguments. And while she is doing her TED talks, there are thousands of other scientists studying psychotherapy and how to treat symptoms, etc, and that is never going to get any press at all because everybody is more fascinated by these weird mediastars and their ridiculous trifling bloviation.

This is rife throughout the Academy. Somehow, this nonsense needs to be pulled out, root and branch. She didn't "fall". She was revealed.

Whenever there's a catastrophie in the USA, there's usually a Harvard man at the center of it.

As someone with a background in psych research I find it surprising that these outliers were included in the final dataset. The heteroscedasticity of the data would be apparent in the methodology section and flagged as such by any peer reviewers, I presume

I was discussing her case with some colleagues, and they also agreed that she had done some horrible things. They expressed concern that she might win the case, though I hope not. We speculated about how she could manipulate the situation in the court, playing with the idea of how others attempted to destroy her reputation. However, regardless of the outcome, it's clear that she has lost her credibility forever.

With Dan Ariely as a co author and supervisor. I'd have to side with Data Colada. He is also accused of falsifying data, but he kept his job.

I am an old man and I have just recently come to understand the age-old battle of empiricism vs rationalism. I finally understand the argument and I stand with empiricism.

Haha, I can tell you had fun making the video animations with how it all flips and flops everywhere! 😊

Its strange to pick on this person in particular. What I saw was data manipulation of a fairly standard kind, misunderstanding of the value of ordinal data and a somewhat bizarre criticism of column headers. The presentation itself was fast. Blasting from one fact to another, never giving you time to process what was going on. In essence, the researchers method of removing outliers was assumed to be deceptive. I have no doubt that the researchers knew that dopping so would skew the results in their favour, but I'm willing to bet the entire department considered that kind of thing to be valid research. I think the row duplicate was a genuine mistake. My advice is that a log transform should be used whenever possible, removing the need to remove outliers

I've been talking about similar issues too. You got my subscription!

Have you done the President of Stanford University? A freshman with the university newspaper scooped the story.

Fantastic video mate, the best I’ve seen on this Francesca Gino thing.

Great video!

Meanwhile, Dan Ariely keeps his job and gets to advise a TV show despite doing the exact same thing.

Awesome video!

I just stumbled upon your channel. I've decided to subscribe. Keep up the good work.

I didn't understand the vitriol thrown at her but this video explains it quite well basing your work on the wrong data or making it up yourself to defend your work is wrong ...she should have been a politician, academia was not for her😂

I am hoping AI, trained to detect such frauds with much available material, will be applied to the research of the past. Much cant will fall.

Good job on the video 👍

This is a problem not only with scientists, but all professions. For example, a professional engineer needs to be truthful about their results and faking them can be very bad, thus faking results can result in being fired for cause. This does not necessarily mean the underling science or technology is wrong, but it could be, and thus false data is really bad. The engineering example I saw of this was where the engineer in question had a system fault ruin the data collection of a long difficult test which he was certain what the results would be, so rather than go through all the time and effort of redoing the testing, he just made up passing test results. But, the testing was for quality control endurance testing on communication lasers, some of which in fact did not pass the test. What he did then invalidated any quality testing he did because it was unknown how much faking of results he had been doing. Needless to say, the engineer that faked the data was fired with cause.

The field of psychology is going from a pseudoscience to an absolute shitshow.

I was in a pre-graduate psych program in university and I decided not to continue in academia when I learned that basically all psych research was horribly confounded by the practice of selecting data to support a predetermined outcome.

Peer review process is broken, studies need to be reproduced. there is no alternatives

Great video! But this Carnegie Mellon alumnus grimaced at your pronunciation of “Carnage Mellon.” Andrew Carnegie was from the UK - you know how to pronounce Carnegie. 😅

"Carnage melon university"... that's where I'd like to study 😊

We only here about the cases with something extra glamorous like the irony involved in this case. There are thousands of boring frauds we never get videos about. Think how scary that is. 😮

"Why it pays to break the rules at work and in life" 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🤣😵

Great work 10/10

I watched it once and I believed every single word. I watched it a second time, and now I don't understand almost any claim you do in the video. Honestly, as this video might blow up in the future weeks, I suggest you balance it. As one commentator already pointed out, the claims made only touch smaller details of the publications. Minor mistakes can be found in any publication as the matters involved and statistics can be really complicated nowadays. Also, even scientists do mistakes.

This channel is like the Coffeezilla of the academic world.

Something I’m interested to learn more about. Hehe.

I HATED the video formatting on this podcast. The constant popping up and movements of words on the screen were too fast to follow or read, but also took away enough of my attention that I wasn't comprehending the audio track either.

interesting, but hard to watch, so much useless stuff happening on the screen

CARNAGE MELON HELL YEAH I'M SUBBED

Apparently she didn’t sign the honesty pledge at the top of her own papers…

Content is good but the animations and transitions made me look away and just listen in some portions

0:53 "Carnage melon university" --> "Carnegie Mellon University"

Nice summary. Lots of typos though!

So if this lawsuit is on-going, wh has she supposedly fallen? Is it a case of found guilty merely on accusation, despite categorical denials. This happens to so many men. For once a woman is a victim.

An interesting video, but I have two minor criticisms. 1. The graphics are too tricky and obscure what is being said. 2. You need to review the text before publication - or get an editor to do so.

Thanks for this very interesting video. I suggest that you turn the music down a little bit? For me it made it hard to hear you.

Business Schools ought not to be in universities. There’s no place for MBAs in academia.

10:31 "safty bill"?? Educational science indeed!

0:52 "Carnage"? Seriously? Carnage. It is either CAR-neh-gee (US style) or car-NEH-gee (Scots style)--both have a hard "g" as in geek at the end. Good video otherwise. . . at least as far as I can tell; I don't have access to the original documents.

Great story! I don't know if you can edit your video, but it's Carnegie Mellon, not Carnage --which has a rather nasty meaning.

Her work on dishonesty was a Freudian slip

Could be something as silly as misusing excell:adding data to the spreadsheets with rows with unmatched column entries . Careless, but something expected from fuzzy subject researchers.

"Carnage Mellon" is where Gallagher got his degree.

Carnage Mellon sounds about right

This is some great animation, I love the design but it feels like you ought to linger on some screens like BobbyBroccoli or LegalEagle does. Too much motion can be a bit distracting from the narration.

He definitely edited this video in MS PowerPoint

Maybe if I'm a researcher specializing in dishonesty and I authenticity, no one will notice...

Carnage mellon has me rolling💀💀💀💀

Peer review is like wrestling with a loaded gun

9:45 bear, not bare :-)

thought that was loki in the thumbnail

What did you use to make this video?

A suggestion to add to other comments: please proof and spell check all your text. Interesting content, nonetheless!

"Carnage-Melon University" 🤭 I am amused by little things...😅

Can you look at the PACE trial please.

Why not do a video on the much more far-reaching (not to mention exceedingly more interesting) case known as the Grievance Studies Affair, undertaken by Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose?

Did you say "Carnage Mellon"? Lol, sorry, it's usually we Americans who get skewered for butchering pronunciations. Nice video!

Carnage-Mellon University? Let me guess. They investigate watermelon stabbings....

Good thing someone didn't "trust the science". We need more guys like that right now.

There are some real smart people in academics today. They all know exactly how to game the system.

It's sickening

It seems like intellectual narcissism.

Publish or perish is true in academic. However, it's not a good idea to improve the quality of education. Let's stop forcing professors to publish their works and pay more attention to the class. I'm not saying what she did is good. I don’t support frauds. But nowadays, I think the whole academic movement is going in the wrong directions. To discover new knowledge, publishing paper, and conducting research is not the only way. It takes so much time. What lecturers need to focusing is their teaching. Give them enough time to upgrade their knowledge and spend more time in classrooms with students. I am a lecturer in art and design. Our focus should be improving our skills in designing, creative think, ng and so on. If you can't draw or design multimedia, what's the point of being lecturerers in this field. I know a professor in music. And her major is in piano. She can't even play piano well, so what's the point of publishing paper? She got the title because of those papers, but she can't play piano like a professional!!!! .What the uni did is push us to publish academic works and fill unnecessary forms, doing paperwork. This is a global phenomenon. I want more time to upgrade my knowledge and keep up with the new trend of technologies in the field, but I spend most of the time doing silly statistics and paperwork. It gives me a lot of questions about the real body of knowledge in my field. Okay I might be able to publish thousands of papers and research, but if I can't teach my students to be able to design, using industrial standards software, they will be so unprepared for the job market. Nowadays, I barely publish my work, and I want to focus on improving the artistic skills to teach my students. Let's get real. The classes in many unis are out-of-date. It's pedantic. It's not practical. And FYI, many uni call students "clients" instead. They lower the bar of evaluating works to attract more students. All they need is lecturers should give funds or money to uni (find more clients basically). What's about our real job? We are not a salesman. We SHOULD TEACH!

car neh gee melon is how you say the name of the university

Commenting for the algorithm

Where exactly is "Carnage Melon" University? Is that where Gallagher went to school?

American titan this one

Francesca was right Data Coloada is no where as knowledgable as they think. Their mistakes were obvious to me and I am a QC guy in manufacturing. If Data Colada has the power to get people fired than fired people have the right to sue. The real problem is that no one is having a serious discussion about how to analyze data

I have a hypothesis -Academia has become as navel gazing as Instagram : - 0 With much power, comes great responsibility. Absolute power, corrupts absolutely.

Like Mark Jacobson, she will withdraw the suit or lose and probably pay the other sides costs.

"Carnage Mellon University"?

This is only the tip of the iceberg.

What abour Dan Arielly with whom she collaborated?

David Sinclair next.

Is it that the professor is just not good with Excel (and sloppy)? It’s easy to get columns disconnected when you try to sort a data set if you’re not careful. It happens often.

The most ironic things is how most of the research focuses on ethics and means to improve honesty. Of course such a thing needs data manipulation ...

You have me at “Academic Industry.” But oh man the words. But how do you measure the value of this industry? In the US we’d have to acknowledge the college football industry as well. It ain’t all papers.

Society might want to be more careful about putting people on a pedestal because of their vocation, whether they be doctors or lawyer or scientists or clergy. There are good people in these careers and there are also bad ones. They are people, just like we are.

Car-na-gee

The music is too loud and distracting. 😢

"Carnage Melon" 😅 To properly pronounce the first name it should be a hard g, and the i is not silent.