Harvard’s celebrity honesty and ethics expert appears to have faked her data and plagiarized both published papers and student theses:
Harvard University honesty researcher Francesca Gino, whose work has come under fire for suspected data falsification, may also have plagiarized passages in some of her high-profile publications. A book chapter co-authored by Gino, who was found by a 2023 Harvard Business School (HBS) investigation to have committed research misconduct, contains numerous passages of text with striking similarities to 10 earlier sources. The sources include published papers and student theses, according to an analysis shared with Science by University of Montreal psychologist Erinn Acland.
Science has confirmed Acland’s findings and identified at least 15 additional passages of borrowed text in Gino’s two books, Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life and Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan. Some passages duplicate text from news reports or blogs. Others contain phrasing identical to passages from academic literature. The extent of duplication varies between passages, but all contain multiple identical phrases, as well as clear paraphrases and significant structural similarity…
Acland says she decided to “poke around” into Gino’s work in September 2023, after the researcher filed a $25 million lawsuit against HBS and the data sleuths who uncovered the misconduct. Acland focused on plagiarism, rather than data issues, because of her experience detecting it in student work. She searched phrases from Gino’s work on Google Scholar to see whether they matched content from other works.
She says she found apparent plagiarism in the very first sentence of the first work she assessed, the 2016 chapter “Dishonesty explained: What leads moral people to act immorally.” The sentence—“The accounting scandals and the collapse of billion-dollar companies at the beginning of the 21st century have forever changed the business landscape”—is word for word the same as a passage in a 2010 paper by the University of Washington management researcher Elizabeth Umphress and colleagues.
Trust the science, right?
This woman is obviously deeply unsuited for her job, but she should be fired for sheer stupidity, rather than plagiarism. Because if you’re dumb enough to still be plagiarizing other people’s work when you can simply have Chat GPT or some other AI simply crank out whatever text you need, you aren’t smart enough to be employed in 2024. Plus there is the added benefit of AI being reliably wrong with regards to statistics, so you’ll be off the hook for any data fakery as well.
Cabanac has found almost 100 cases of obviously AI-generated scientific papers, which he called “only the tiny tip of the iceberg.” A recent study by the librarian Andrew Gray used words that appear disproportionately often in text generated by ChatGPT — among them commendable, intricate, and meticulously — to estimate that 60,000 scholarly papers were at least partially generated by AI in 2023.