alt Hacker NewsDan Ariely has a long history of controversies and studies with falsified data. He wrote 3 popular books and gained a lot of fame before others started uncovering the problems in his studies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely
It’s amazing that problems with his studies are still being uncovered. Equally amazing that Duke still maintains a relationship with him after so many problems have been identified with his research.
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We'd find problems with many if not most published studies if we scutinized them the same way. People like him get discovered because they step out of their academic bubble into the light of the world stage.
And mind you this is psychology, the entire discipline is only borderline scientific anyway. But even studies in the hard sciences are very often flawed if not outright fabricated. Adjusting data sets to fit the desired result (who'd ever know as long as you do it properly), changing the experiment and measure until they get what they they want, repeated measuring until the "right" data for the paper appeared randomly - those are all things I personally observed in the lab.
Not to even get started on the house of cards that is basing ones flawed assumptions on other flawed studies without even the slightest attempt at replicating their results first. It's standard practice to simply presume what's been published (especially by friendly authors) can be regarded as reliable.
Reminds me of Francesca Gino for data fabrication. She was also a best seller of sorts.
Dan Ariely's fraud is pretty widespread.
He sold his research to an insurance company, who should have known better: https://www.lemonade.com/blog/oh-behave/
> It revealed that Ariely had a longstanding relationship with Epstein, including having visited him at his New York home on several occasions.[45] One of the documents is an image of an email from Ariely to Epstein, in which he requests the name and email of a "redhead" that Epstein had previously introduced to him
I mean, I've always consigned 100% of NYT self help slop to the bin of books for people who aren't smart but desperately want to seem like they but this is just a little much now, Dan
> In 2006, when he was a professor at the MIT Media Lab, Ariely conducted experiments including administering electric shocks with a research assistant who had no human–subject training. […] Ariely confirmed this and said that he wasn't aware that the research assistant did not have the needed one-hour online human–subject training.
A one-hour online training is all that’s needed to be considered ready to conduct experiments involving things like electric shocks on human subjects?
Forget about this guy, the entire field needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.
Ah yes also the author of “The Honest Truth about Dishonesty”. The most amazing thing is he is still a professor at Duke. Wonder if he focused much on academic dishonesty in his book…
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The fraud that Data Colada presents here is unambiguous. It was also no accident in my opinion that they are specifically mentioning that the 3 Excel files were “Last saved by” “Dan Ariely”
I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired for this, but I really wish the Feds would prosecute cases like this as wire fraud instead of leaving insular academic institutions to self-police. This type of fraud is done for personal gain and self-enrichment and causes real, identifiable harms.