by wasoxygen

Here are some recent extraordinary events:

The bloggers at Data Colada published a four-part series alleging fraud in papers co-authored by Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino. She responded by suing both them and Harvard for $25 million.

Earlier, the Colada boys had found evidence of fraud in a paper co-authored by Duke professor Dan Ariely. The real juicy bit? There’s a paper written by both Ariely and Gino in which they might have independently faked the data for two separate studies in the same article. Oh, and the paper is about dishonesty.

All of that is bad. But there's an extra uncomfortable fact that nobody seems to mention, perhaps because they don't see it, or perhaps because they don't want it to be true.

This whole debacle matters a lot socially: careers ruined, reputations in tatters, lawsuits flying. But strangely, it doesn't seem to matter much scientifically. That is, our understanding of psychology remains unchanged. If you think of psychology as a forest, we haven't felled a tree or even broken a branch. We've lost a few apples.

Paul Bloom responds:

Psychology is ok