What is the “optimal level” of social science research fraud? Zero, right? Alas, Dr Francesca Gino, a professor at the prestigious Harvard Business School and an “award-winning researcher” whose work focuses on dishonesty and unethical behavior (she is, get this, the author of Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules in Work and Life), has herself been accused of publishing at least four research papers with fake or doctored data. (See here, here, here, and here.) Because she is a professor at Harvard, these data-fabrication allegations have received national and even international media attention.

Shame on Dr Gino, but what about Harvard and her co-authors? Are they victims of Gino’s alleged fraud, or just as guilty as Gino for enabling her deceit, or somewhere in-between? And what about the journals that published her papers? Among these are the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see here), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (here), and Psychological Science (here). For my part, I have proposed extending the law of fraud to academic journals. Until courts begin imposing legal liability, both civil and criminal, on authors and journals for publishing fake studies, we can expect many more cases of data fraud in the future.