Category: psychology

A psychology researcher already under fire for several questionable studies has had her PhD revoked by a university tribunal that found it likely she fabricated data in her thesis. 

Ping Dong, who was a doctoral student at the University of Toronto from 2012 to 2017, had already earned retractions for two papers based on her thesis before the tribunal’s decision to cancel her degree and give the thesis a failing grade. A summary of the case the school has made available online reveals those retractions, which we’ve previously reported on, arose from more serious misconduct than previously publicized and were also subject to an institutional investigation. 

Dong’s research concerned how moral violations and unethical behavior, such as tax evasion or adultery, influence consumer choices.. According to the university’s report, her thesis had an “improbable level of duplication” in the answers research participants gave to open-ended questions. Dong also allegedly confessed to a former supervisor that her husband impersonated participants in her studies and that she had failed to properly randomize the results – although the supervisor contests that Dong ever admitted this to her. 

Continue reading Exclusive: Psychology researcher loses PhD after allegedly using husband in study and making up data

The journal Social Influence will be issuing expressions of concern for four papers by Nicolas Guéguen, a marketing researcher whose work has long been dogged by allegations, Retraction Watch has learned. 

Guéguen has to date has lost at least three papers to retraction, and has received many more expressions of concern, for his questionable studies. However, his institution, the Université de Bretagne-Sud, cleared him of wrongdoing in 2019.  

Guéguen made a name for himself for his quirky studies – often about human sexuality – like one purporting to find women with bigger breasts were more likely to be successful hitchhikers; and one which claimed to find men with guitar cases are more attractive to women. (The first of those articles has an expression of concern; the second was retracted in 2020.)

Continue reading Exclusive: ‘Bust Size and Hitchhiking’ author to earn four more expressions of concern

An article that proposed potential benefits of private equity firms investing in autism service providers has been removed from the journal in which it was published.

The article, “Private equity investment: Friend or foe to applied behavior analysis?” was originally published in the International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education as part of a January 2023 special issue devoted to applied behavior analysis (ABA) for autism.

ABA is the most widely used therapy for autism, and companies that provide it have faced a flood of interest from private equity firms in the past decade.

Continue reading Article defending private-equity involvement in autism services retracted

The economist behind a controversial study showing attractive female students got lower grades after classes moved online during the pandemic has been acquitted of research misconduct, according to a report from his former institution.

But the researcher, Adrian Mehic, did not get off without reproof: Even if the work kept to the letter of the law, it may still have had “unethical consequences,” Erik Renström, vice-chancellor of Lund University in Sweden, wrote in the June 8 report (in Swedish).

In the study, a jury made up largely of final-year high schoolers rated the looks of university students based on pictures taken from social media accounts. The ratings were then linked to other publicly available data about the students, including academic performance. The findings, published in the journal Economics Letters in August 2022, made headlines across the globe.

But the students had not consented to the research, nor were they informed about it. The revelation unleashed “a storm of criticism at the university,” according to local media. 

Continue reading Swedish beauty study that sparked ‘storm of criticism’ is cleared

For much of the past year, we and several colleagues in our field have been trying to convince a publisher to retract a book. 

Advocates are using the text because it contains details on how to advance numerous laws in the United States and throughout the world. The text is also currently being used to influence judicial decisions that affect the lives of thousands of families.

The problem is, the work contains a massive amount of misinformation, misquoted sources, plagiarized text, and many other flaws.

We have been so disappointed with the failure of the publisher and the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) to address our concerns and our request for retraction that we have decided to share our experience with the scientific community. 

Continue reading Guest post: What happened when we tried to get a book with misinformation about our field retracted

In 2017, a paper published in Nature Human Behavior made international headlines for the authors’ claim they had developed a way to analyze brain scans using machine learning to identify youth at risk for suicide. 

“It was a big, splashy finding,” said Timothy Verstynen, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the research. But at a neuroimaging conference soon after the publication, other researchers discussed the study “in kind of a sense of disbelief,” he said. 

The 91% accuracy for identifying suicidality that the researchers reported, from a sample size of just a few dozen participants, he said, “kind of went against what we as a field were starting to understand about the nature of these brain phenotype markers based off of neuroimaging data.” 

After six years of scrutiny, during which Verstynen attempted to replicate the work but found a key problem, the authors of the 2017 paper have retracted the article. 

Continue reading High-profile paper that used AI to identify suicide risk from brain scans retracted for flawed methods

A journal has issued an expression of concern about five papers by a psychology researcher whose studies related to women’s sexual behavior and perceived attractiveness have raised eyebrows. 

As we’ve previously reported, sleuths have identified seemingly impossible and likely fabricated results in the work of Nicolas Guéguen, a professor of marketing at the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, leading to the retraction of four of his papers.  

The latest expression of concern relates to five articles in Perceptual and Motor Skills, a SAGE title, which has published eight studies of Guéguen’s, including several on which he is listed as the sole author.

The notice applies to:

Continue reading “Bust Size and Hitchhiking” author earns five expressions of concern

A psychologist whose controversial publications on human behavior have attracted scrutiny for their implausible workload and impossible statistics has lost a third paper – seven years after sleuths first began questioning it. 

The 2012 article, “Color and Women Attractiveness: When Red Clothed Women Are Perceived to Have More Intense Sexual Intent,” was published in the Journal of Social Psychology, a Taylor & Francis title. It has been cited 53 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

Nicolas Guéguen of the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France is listed as the paper’s sole author. We’ll let him describe the article, as he did in its abstract: 

Continue reading Paper about “sexual intent” of women wearing red retracted seven years after sleuths raised concerns

A psychology professor has lost a paper for failing to disclose a crucial conflict of interest about one of the subjects of the work, which critiqued various blogs.

That’s because one of those blogs was written by none other than the author of the paper, Peter Kinderman, a professor at the University of Liverpool and a former president of the British Psychological Society. 

The paper’s comments about Kinderman’s Blog ‘F’ were generally positive, with phrases such as: 

Continue reading What happened when a psychology professor used a peer-reviewed paper to praise his own blog – and slam others’