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We'd find problems with many if not most published studies if we scutinized them the same way. People like him get discovered because they step out of their academic bubble into the light of the world stage.

And mind you this is psychology, the entire discipline is only borderline scientific anyway. But even studies in the hard sciences are very often flawed if not outright fabricated. Adjusting data sets to fit the desired result (who'd ever know as long as you do it properly), changing the experiment and measure until they get what they they want, repeated measuring until the "right" data for the paper appeared randomly - those are all things I personally observed in the lab.

Not to even get started on the house of cards that is basing ones flawed assumptions on other flawed studies without even the slightest attempt at replicating their results first. It's standard practice to simply presume what's been published (especially by friendly authors) can be regarded as reliable.

Reminds me of Francesca Gino for data fabrication. She was also a best seller of sorts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino

> It revealed that Ariely had a longstanding relationship with Epstein, including having visited him at his New York home on several occasions.[45] One of the documents is an image of an email from Ariely to Epstein, in which he requests the name and email of a "redhead" that Epstein had previously introduced to him

I mean, I've always consigned 100% of NYT self help slop to the bin of books for people who aren't smart but desperately want to seem like they but this is just a little much now, Dan

> In 2006, when he was a professor at the MIT Media Lab, Ariely conducted experiments including administering electric shocks with a research assistant who had no human–subject training. […] Ariely confirmed this and said that he wasn't aware that the research assistant did not have the needed one-hour online human–subject training.

A one-hour online training is all that’s needed to be considered ready to conduct experiments involving things like electric shocks on human subjects?

Forget about this guy, the entire field needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.

"Ariely is named 636 times in the Epstein files".

Yikes.

Replication is unpaid QA on someone else's product. Nobody gets tenure for finding the bug, hence the field has been meaning to get around to it for 20 years.

Why do we even accept anything as true without replication by default?

"easy to replicate (no fancy equipment needed, just ask some people to proofread)"

? This was a human subject study, that would cost $$ and there would be very little upside to confirmation and only a little notoriety with a failure to replicate (which by the way is not dispositive, people might need multiple failed replications to know who to believe, depending on the size of the replication). Maybe you didn't read the post: this was data fraud discovered by statistical irregularities. That is indeed becoming easy to spot with more widespread statistical literacy, at least for unsophisticated jobs like this from decades ago.

> Is there some way to change incentives to get people to try and replicate?

Sure. Pay them to do it.

That rule would make it difficult to report on a failure to replicate a published paper.

In the physical sciences, any sufficiently important paper is independently verified. Sounds like cost/effort of these multi year studies is not faesible to replicate, but then again, I know nothing about social science so w/e

Per the post, the original authors have requested that the original paper be retracted. That’s well above the bar of “not doing much”.

There is no alternative to deadlines because time is money, and those downstream of you can ill afford to wait on your deliverables. Part of management's job is to determine how much time it should take so a reasonable timetable that stakeholders can agree to can be set, and then hold you accountable for delivering within that time frame.

I wish we could revive Tim Bryce's mind with AI, because I'd love to hear what he'd have to say in a podcast about this topic:

"Fraud in a procrastination study? You don't say! I don't understand why all this taxpayer money is going to study procrastination in the first place. Procrastination is a well-known phenomenon with a well-understood cause: laziness. Procrastinators didn't have a boot placed to their behinds growing up, so they reached adulthood slacking and coasting on their trust-fund money or couch-surfing at their friends' places, mooching off others. You see this a lot in modern software organizations, especially among the programmers. And now those programmers are all crying because they're about to get replaced by Claude Code. Boo hoo! The military knew how to deal with procrastinators, too: send them to scrub latrines with a toothbrush, and drum them out if they didn't shape up after that! We don't need millions of dollars in government grants going to academic research to study this phenomenon. It's as old as humanity itself—we called it the deadly sin of sloth. Friends, keep the faith!"

Dan Ariely was one of the biggest disappointments and betrayals of my intellectual life. I found the "research" he did to be mind-blowing, groundbreaking stuff at the time, and I told many people his work, sharing his papers and podcasts as a true enthusiast.

I am astonished that he holds an academic-adjacent position anywhere, no matter what his regrets might be today. Private redemption shouldn't be out of reach, but it shouldn't be possible for him to hold a position at any institution concerned with uncovering Truth. He should have resigned out of respect, if his institution was too gutless to do so. It's a tragedy.

It's arguably worse. Jason Arday was doing qualitative work in education. Nobody pays any attention to anything UK educationalists write. Dan Ariely was a genuine superstar and writer of popular bestsellers (with academic content).

There is a lot of bad ML research for the same reason.