Harvard Business School’s investigative report into the behavioral scientist Francesca Gino was made public this week, revealing extensive details about how the institution came to conclude that the professor committed research misconduct in a series of papers.
The nearly 1,300-page document was unsealed after a Tuesday ruling from a Massachusetts judge, the latest development in a $25 million lawsuit that Gino filed last year against Harvard University, the dean of the Harvard Business School, and three business-school professors who first notified Harvard of red flags in four of her papers. All four have been retracted.
Gino has strenuously denied that she ever altered or falsified data. Her lawyer, Andrew T. Miltenberg, said in a statement that the report showed that “this investigation was a charade,” noting that Harvard did not find evidence that Gino directly modified data.
The investigation committee, however, was unswayed by Gino’s explanations for how the data had been tampered with.
According to the report, dated March 7, 2023, one of Gino’s main defenses to the committee was that the perpetrator could have been someone else — someone who had access to her computer, online data-storage account, and/or data files.
Gino named a professor as the most likely suspect. The person’s name was redacted in the released report, but she is identified as a female professor who was a co-author of Gino’s on a 2012 now-retracted paper about inducing honest behavior by prompting people to sign a form at the top rather than at the bottom. According to the report, Gino said that the scholar had access to Gino’s online data-storage account, as well as a “motive”: Allegedly, she was “angry” at Gino for “not sufficiently defending” one of their collaborators “against perceived attacks by another co-author” concerning an experiment in the paper.
But the investigation committee did not see a “plausible motive” for the other professor to have committed misconduct by falsifying Gino’s data. “Gino presented no evidence of any data falsification actions by actors with malicious intentions,” the committee wrote. “She offered only speculation that one or more such actors were responsible for the data anomalies and discrepancies at issue in the allegations.”
Gino’s other main defense, according to the report: Honest errors may have occurred when her research assistants were coding, checking, or cleaning the data. Gino told the investigators that if such errors had occurred, she would take full responsibility as the principal investigator.
Again, however, the committee wrote that “she does not provide any evidence of [research assistant] error that we find persuasive in explaining the major anomalies and discrepancies.”
Over all, the committee determined “by a preponderance of the evidence” that Gino “significantly departed from accepted practices of the relevant research community and committed research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” for five alleged instances of misconduct across the four papers. The committee’s findings were unanimous, except in one instance. For the 2012 paper about signing a form at the top, Gino was alleged to have falsified or fabricated the results for one study by removing or altering descriptions of the study procedures from drafts of the manuscript submitted for publication, thus misrepresenting the procedures in the final version. Gino acknowledged that there could have been an honest error on her part. One committee member felt that the “burden of proof” was not met while the two other members believed that research misconduct had, in fact, been committed.
After joining the faculty of the Harvard Business School in 2010, Gino became a prolific researcher and in-demand expert on matters of workplace management and behavioral issues, including dishonesty. But in June 2023, Harvard put her on administrative leave — stripping her of her salary and endowed faculty title and barring her from campus — after finding that she had committed research misconduct in four papers. Among those papers’ findings: The motives people have when networking affects how they feel about doing it; feeling inauthentic leads people to feel more impure; acting dishonestly can enhance creativity; and signing a form at the top leads to more honest self-reporting.
The committee’s report details how the investigation started with a complaint submitted by a group of anonymous researchers. They have since been revealed to be the trio of business-school professors who blog together as Data Colada. The investigation relied on interviews with seven people including Gino, electronic files of hers, an outside firm’s forensic analyses, interview transcripts, and written responses, according to the report.
Harvard had initially submitted the report in October as part of a partial motion to dismiss Gino’s lawsuit, which alleged that she had been defamed, that she had been the subject of gender discrimination, and that Harvard had breached her contract. Gino had argued to keep the report sealed, but Judge Myong J. Joun, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, ruled this week that it is a judicial record “to which there exists a presumptive right of public access.”
