No English subtitles unfortunately, but some *very* interesting info in this Israeli Channel 13 reporting from last year about the ongoing Dan Ariely scandal.
A few things I didn’t know: 1/
13tv.co.il
A few things I didn’t know: 1/
13tv.co.il
Ariely apparently left MIT in ‘08 after conducting an experiment that administered electric shocks to undergrads, *w/o IRB approval (!!)*. When confronted, he tried to throw his RAs under the bus. He received a 1 year suspension from running experiments, then moved to Duke. 2/
In the 2010’s Ariely had a contract to deliver ✌️behavioral insights✌️to the Israeli budget office that netted his consulting firm about $5 Million over 4 years. Their reports, which were mostly not made public, included recs like “make the government website mobile accessible”3/
In 2018 Ariely opened an investment fund based on an index that ranked companies by their company culture. In interviews, he claimed that his index could get at least a 6.5% higher return than the S&P 500, & raised around $30 Million. Returns for the fund were…disappointing. 4/
Ariely has systematically embellished, exaggerated, and outright invented scientific findings in his many public talks. Just one example: in later years, he claimed that in his lying study that famously shredded subjects’ tests, he used a paper shredder that only shredded… 5/
…the sides of paper, but made the subjects believe that the whole paper was shredded. This allowed him to observe *individual* rates of cheating directly.
Only problem: no such study was ever published, and none of his co-authors know anything about this magic shredder. 6/
Only problem: no such study was ever published, and none of his co-authors know anything about this magic shredder. 6/
There’s more in this report, too much to list here. And remember, all this stuff is on top of the very credible evidence from DataColada of Ariely (and some of his collaborators) outright faking data in his studies. 7/
datacolada.org
datacolada.org
Not to mention the recent rumors that Ariely has been trying to pin the blame for his data falsification on other researchers (h/t @CFCamerer): econjobrumors.com
8/
8/
You have to ask yourself: when is enough enough? Why are we, collectively, and @DukeU @DukeFuqua specifically, allowing this charlatan to keep sullying the reputation of a whole field, while he makes millions of dollars off his scams in the process?
9/9
9/9
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