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A renowned Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired after an investigation found she allegedly manipulated data to
By: Richard Pollina
Published: May 27, 2025
A renowned Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired after an investigation found she fabricated data on multiple studies focused on dishonesty.
Francesca Gino, a celebrated behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, was let go after the school’s top governing board determined she tweaked observations in four studies so that their findings boosted her hypotheses, GBH News reported.
Harvard administrators notified business faculty that Gino was out of a job in a closed-door meeting this past week, the outlet reported.
[ Francesca Gino, a celebrated behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School whose work has focused on dishonesty, was fired by Harvard last week. ]
Harvard did not detail the professor’s firing or tenure being stripped — citing it as a personnel matter — but told GBH News that the school had not revoked a professor’s tenure in decades.
No professors have had their tenure revoked at Harvard since the 1940s, when the American Association of University Professors formalized termination rules, according to The Harvard Crimson.
The Post has reached out to Harvard for comment.
The star Ivy League professor — who had authored over 140 scholarly papers and snagged numerous awards — had come under scrutiny in 2023 when a trio of behavioral scientists published a series of blog posts on Data Colada with evidence accusing four of her papers published between 2012 and 2020 she had co-authored contained “fraudulent data.”
A preliminary investigation into Gino’s work by Harvard was launched in October 2021, following concerns about a study she co-authored that claimed requiring individuals to sign an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form, rather than at the end, significantly boosts honest responses.
This study was definitively retracted in 2021 due to “evidence” of data fabrication, which relied on three separate lab experiments to support its findings.
The same three behavioral scientists identified evidence that three other studies in the same paper appeared to rely on manipulated data.
A full probe into the allegations was conducted in 2022 and 2023, where Gino and people who worked with her on the papers were interviewed, with faculty of the Harvard Business School also reviewing and analyzing her data, emails, and papers’ manuscripts.
An outside forensics firm was also hired to analyze her studies’ data.
When asked about the issues with her work, Gino asserted that issues with her work may stem from errors by her or her research assistants or potential tampering by someone with “malicious intentions,” according to the university report.
However, investigators rejected both theories and provided findings to HBS Dean Datar in March 2023.
The Ivy League school placed Gino on unpaid leave and began termination proceedings.
Investigators also suggested that the university audit Gino’s work and request retractions for three of the papers; a fourth paper had already been retracted by the time of their inquiry.
As the investigation was underway in 2023, Gino denied the allegations against her on her website.
“There is one thing I know for sure: I did not commit academic fraud. I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result,” she wrote.
“I did not falsify data to bolster any result. I did not commit the offense I am accused of. Period.”
Gino — whose behavioral research studies relating to cheating, lying, and dishonesty received widespread media coverage over the past decade — filed a $25 million lawsuit against Harvard, Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar, and the Data Colada bloggers.
In court filings, Gino claimed reputational damage along with loss of income and career opportunities due to the school’s investigation and decision to place her on administrative leave beginning June 2023, in addition to the Data Colada blogs.
“Harvard shared their case. And while my lawyers have discouraged me from speaking out, I just need to say that I did not — ever — engage in academic fraud,” Gino posted on her website in March 2024.
“Once I have the opportunity to prove this in the court of law, with the support of experts I was denied through Harvard’s investigation process, you’ll see why their case is so weak and that these are bogus allegations.”
However, a federal judge in Boston dismissed Gino’s defamation claims against both Harvard and the Data Colada bloggers last September, The Harvard Crimson reported.
The judge ruled that the professor was a public figure, allowing her work to be scrutinized under the First Amendment.
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Today in irony.
Commuters who listen to music or browse social media might be increasing their chance of a stressful workday. Research by Francesca Gino and colleagues offers better ways to cope with a bad commute.
We are all being manipulated by behavioral economics
Ever notice how whenever you’re taking an Uber the driver usually gets another fare just before he (Uber drivers are overwhelmingly male) is about to drop you off? That’s on purpose.
Earlier this month the New York Times published an interactive feature describing how Uber uses behavioral economics (or psychological tricks) to encourage its drivers to work longer, take more fares, and so on.
Here’s a quick sidebar note about behavioral economics from Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School:
According to the traditional view in economics, we are rational agents, well informed with stable preferences, self-controlled, self-interested, and optimizing. The behavioral perspective takes issue with this view and suggests that we are characterized by fallible judgment and malleable preferences and behaviors, can make mistakes calculating risks, can be impulsive or myopic, and are driven by social desires (e.g., looking good in the eyes of others). In other words, we are simply human.
And now back to Uber. One tactic they use is goal setting. People are drawn to goals. This translates into driver messages like this one: “You’re $10 away from making $330 in net earnings. Are you sure you want to go offline?”
But the experiment I found most interesting from the NY Times piece is the one that Lyft completed where it discovered that showing drivers lost/dropped fares was a far more powerful motivator than showing completed rides. In other words: Look at all this money you’re losing out on by not driving!
This finding is in line with something I’ve written about a few times before on this blog: prospect theory. One of the tenets of this theory is that “losses hurt more than gains feel good.” We, humans, tend to focus more on the former.
Of course, Uber is not alone in employing behavioral economics. Every app on your phone is being continuously optimized so that it gets as much of your attention as possible. But where is the line between encouragement and manipulation?
If you’re interested in this topic, check out this HBR article called, Uber Shows How Not to Apply Behavioral Economics.
A handshake before a negotiation can have a surprisingly strong effect on the outcome, according to Michael Norton, Francesca Gino, and colleagues.
Humans have lots of rituals to choose from when greeting each other—embrace or no embrace? Kiss one cheek or two? But one ritual that is remarkably consistent across cultures is the handshake.
“That form of physical contact is surprisingly ubiquitous,” says Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton, Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration. “We shake when we say hello to someone, and we shake again after a deal is done.”
Centuries ago, the handshake may have originated as a way for people to show each other that they were unarmed. Norton was curious: Is the handshake today seen as a mere formality or does it still serve an important purpose in modern society? He joined with HBS Professor Francesca Gino, Juliana Schroeder of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and Jane Risen of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in conducting a series of experiments to see whether handshaking might still help with negotiating deals.
One more factor for retailers to understand.
Although religion is a central aspect of life for many people across the globe, there is scant research on how religion affects non-religious routines like grocery shopping. But using both field and laboratory data, we recently found that grocery spending decreases as religiosity rises. For companies in industries with razor-thin margins, as in the grocery business, responding to these dynamics may help increase the volume on which success depends.
In a series of five studies, we examined the grocery spending of hundreds of shoppers around the United States, where three out of every four people affiliate with a religion. We started by analyzing the dollar volume of annual grocery store sales per store across 1,600 U.S. counties in 2012 in relation to the number of reported religious adherents (per 1,000 population) in each county. After controlling for county characteristics, such as median age and household income, we found that for each 20% increase in the number of religious adherents in a county, annual grocery sales per store decreases, on average, by about $125,000.
Chef Massimo Bottura’s two rules have allowed his restaurant to stay on top.
Many companies have soared on the wings of radical ideas, from Polaroid’s instant camera to the sharing economy of firms like Airbnb.
Chef Massimo Bottura likewise upended convention in 1995 when he opened his restaurant, Osteria Francescana, in Modena, Italy, and started serving radically reinvented Italian dishes in a culture that placed a premium on tradition. His daring proved no flash in the pan. In 2016, two decades after (barely) surviving the ire of locals to become a three-Michelin-star destination, Osteria secured the top spot on the list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. And it has just been named No. 1 again.
What seemed like a risky move at the time — rebelling against beloved recipes shared across generations — made Bottura a star. That success could have bred complacency, followed by failure, as so often happens in companies across industries. Instead, at Osteria Francescana, success set the stage for further innovation. This restaurant holds two major lessons for organizations around the world that are built on innovation and want to keep their creative edge.
THE STORY OF WHY HUMANS ARE SO CARELESS WITH THEIR PHONES
Consumers act more recklessly with the products they own when better versions become available, according to research by Silvia Bellezza, Joshua M. Ackerman and Francesca Gino. This comic by Josh Neufeld explains.
Read more.