For more than 25 years, Max Bazerman has taught negotiations and behavioral economics at Harvard Business School. In that role, he mentored Francesca Gino, who earlier this year became the first faculty member in Harvard's history to lose tenure.
Gino and Bazerman got to know one another when she was a Ph.D. student at the business school. The two grew closer after she joined the faculty in 2010. Bazerman attended Gino's wedding, and at one point, their families even considered buying condos together in Cambridge. At work, they co-authored multiple studies on unethical behavior.
"We studied the psychology of how good people may do bad things," Bazerman said.
That collaboration unraveled in 2021 after Gino herself was accused of unethical behavior. In his new book, "Inside an Academic Scandal," Bazerman argues that the Gino case should be a wake-up call for behavioral scientists and the broader academic community. He said the investigation highlighted ways that common research practices lacked scrutiny, and scientists should view those flaws as opportunities for improvement.
"There will be lower fraud," he said. "Transparency helps move us forward at a slightly faster pace."
A group of behavioral scientists who run a blog called Data Colada alleged Gino had falsified data in four studies, including one she had co-authored with Bazerman about whether people are more likely to tell the truth if they sign forms before or after filling them out.
"They provided substantial evidence that in one of the studies that Gino had been responsible for the data collection that there were significant abnormalities that didn't make sense," Bazerman said. "I was certainly convinced that there were problems with these papers — and obviously I was most concerned about the paper that had my name on it."
The bloggers shared their findings with Harvard administrators, too, triggering a two-year investigation. They concluded someone had accessed a database to alter data, and said Gino was responsible for fraud. The school put her on leave and banned her from campus.
Asked whether he should have caught the data abnormalities himself, Bazerman paused.
"That's a really complicated question," he said.
Bazerman trusted his colleagues to vet their own contributions, plus the work of their assistants. He said if he's guilty of anything regarding the paper he co-authored with Gino, it was a failure of oversight.
"I'm probably guilty of that on a hundred other papers as well," he admitted. "This was kind of standard practice by myself, but also by most senior researchers in social science."
Gino declined GBH News' interview requests. But in a recent podcast conversation with one of her lawyers, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, Gino said she was never taught about data management during her Ph.D. program.
"It wasn't just me or my lab," she said on the podcast. "It was everybody in the field having the same type of practices and not exactly thinking through, well, if we collect data on paper, what kind of security do we need around it? Or if we insert data in Excel, what kind of errors are likely to happen?"
Gino said she was shocked investigators concluded that she had committed academic misconduct.
"It was really hard to realize that I had been the breadwinner for the family and that it looked like I wouldn't be able to continue providing," she said on the podcast. "And I was being attacked on one of the most important values that I hold."
Gino filed a $25 million lawsuit against Harvard and the bloggers.
Two years after Gino was banned from campus, a faculty panel said she should lose her tenure status. In May, just before Memorial Day, Harvard's governing board agreed, making Gino the first professor in the university's long history to have tenure revoked.
Bazerman maintains that fraud in behavioral science is rare. And after Gino's high-profile case, he believes it will be even rarer. He also warns universities not to exaggerate the problem, especially at a time when government officials are scrutinizing and withholding funds for political reasons.
"We want to make sure that we don't lose the benefits of social science research based on these criticisms," he said, "because there's other people who are spreading misinformation in ways that I think are quite harmful."
Meanwhile, Gino is still fighting her former employer in court. She argues she was unfairly singled out by top administrators, including former Harvard President Claudine Gay, to protect the university's image.
Harvard and Gay declined to comment publicly for this story, but the university is denying Gino's defamation claim in court filings.
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