The Fraudulent Science of Success

Business schools are in the grips of a scandal that threatens to undermine their most influential research-and the credibility of an entire field.

- Daniel Engber

For anyone who teaches at a business school, the blog post was bad news. For Juliana Schroeder, it was catastrophic. She saw the allegations when they first went up, on a Saturday in early summer 2023. Schroeder teaches management and psychology at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. One of her colleaguesa star professor at Harvard Business School named Francesca Gino-had just been accused of academic fraud. The authors of the blog post, a small team of business-school researchers, had found discrepancies in four of Gino's published papers, and they suggested that the scandal was much larger. "We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data," the blog post said. "Perhaps dozens." The story was soon picked up by the mainstream press. Reporters reveled in the irony that Gino, who had made her name as an expert on the psychology of breaking rules, may herself have broken them. ("Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings," a New York Times headline read.) Harvard Business School had quietly placed Gino on administrative leave just before the blog post appeared. The school had conducted its own investigation; its nearly 1,300-page internal report, which was made public only in the course of related legal proceedings, concluded that Gino "committed research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly" in the four papers. (Gino has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing.) Schroeder's interest in the scandal was more personal. Gino was one of her most consistent and important research partners.