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- Hacker News
- One thing I didn't know before reading this: an unusually large effect size can itself be a red flag. You don't have to understand all the statistics to at least notice when a result looks almost too good to be true.by mulanroo
- I'm glad the authors seem to have acknowledged the problem and not doing much about it :-)by keyle
- Dan Ariely is well past the point that he needs to not be a faculty member at Duke University. Data Coda do a fantastic job ferreting out academic fraud. With these fraudulent behavioral science experiments like this relying on printed papers/markups, and coauthors not present and who did not even see the raw data, I wonder if the experiment was ever actually conducted. I would love to see that question answered where fraud is suspected, something I'd hope IRBs would step up to do.by dramm
- I came here for a procrastination joke comment and didn't find it, but I suppose someone will get around to it eventually.by herewulf
- No paper should ever be referenced until it has been replicated by an independent group. The replication crisis in science is real, and it won't take long for no one to believe anything anymore.by freediddy
- It does seem like its way too easy to do this kind of fraud.
The study seems extremely easy to replicate (no fancy equipment needed, just ask some people to proofread), and yet nobody did until now. Is there some way to change incentives to get people to try and replicate? Assign undergrads to replicate random research papers?
by bawolff - Science is self-correcting, but sometimes, the correction mechanism it is very slow and inconsequential enough that people are incentivized to just publish anything. Peer review is merely a quality check—and not a very good one. Just the other day, I ran into a paper in my field that claims to have solved a central problem that scientists have been working on for 50 years, single-authored, using some fancy mathematics. I was excited to read it, but it didn't take long for me to find out that it's complete BS-derivations that don't follow, made-up equation terms, and conflation of basic terms in the field. I was really surprised that this passed the editor and at least two peer reviewers. I dug deeper and found that the same author has published 11 research articles in top journals in 2026 alone — mostly physics and chemistry, and adjacent fields— and I'm talking about really top journals like Scientific Reports and Physics Letters B. Most of these have serious mathematical flaws that are unfixable. I wrote to a couple of editors, but only one took it seriously enough to initiate an investigation. I made a promise to myself that if no real action is taken, I will seriously consider changing careers.by jarenmf
- Dan Ariely has a long history of controversies and studies with falsified data. He wrote 3 popular books and gained a lot of fame before others started uncovering the problems in his studies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely
It’s amazing that problems with his studies are still being uncovered. Equally amazing that Duke still maintains a relationship with him after so many problems have been identified with his research.
by Aurornis