The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has retracted a highly influential 2012 paper by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University whose work has been called into question over concerns about the data in some of his publications.
The retraction wasn’t unexpected. Ariely and his colleagues said last month that they would be pulling the article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end,” in the wake of revelations that some of the data in the study appear to have been fabricated.
As Stephanie Lee of BuzzFeed reported in August:
The researchers who published the study all agree that its data appear to be fraudulent and have requested that the journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, retract it. But it’s still unclear who made up the data or why — and four of the five authors said they played no part in collecting the data for the test in question.
Ariely was that fifth author, the one responsible for gathering the purportedly bogus data from an insurance company that now says, according to Lee, that it has not been able to provide such figures.
The terse notice — which, commendably, links to the data sleuths who initially flagged the article, unlike many other journals — states:
The editors are retracting this article and note that Simonsohn, Simmons, and Nelson (http://datacolada.org/98) have provided evidence to question the validity of the data in the article.
The paper — which was edited by Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, himself no stranger to Retraction Watch — has been cited 180 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
The summer has not been kind to Ariely’s CV. In late July, as we reported then, Psychological Science issued an expression of concern for a 2004 paper by the Duke researcher after a group in Hong Kong found statistical anomalies in the highly-cited article.
At the time, Ariely told us that:
It’s a good thing for science to put a question mark [on] this. … This is the way that science should progress
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Note that Daniel Kahneman is not what most scientists would call a Nobelist, since the prize he got is the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, not one of the “real” Nobel prizes.
Thierry:
Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama agree with you, I’m sure.