Harvard Sues ‘Honesty Professor,’ Claims She Sent School Fake Data Set to Disprove Fraud Allegations

Harvard University filed a defamation lawsuit against a former Harvard Business School professor, alleging that she falsified a data set in an effort to prove that she had not previously committed data fraud.

Francesca Gino, a behavioral scientist and former professor known for her research on honesty, is accused in the suit of fraudulently backdating a file to make it appear as though the file was created in 2010. According to the suit, filed in August, the backdating was part of a scheme to convince investigators that she had been provided an incorrect data set by a research assistant years ago, when she had actually created the data set herself years later, once she came under scrutiny.

Gino was first accused of misconduct in 2021 after allegedly falsifying data in four separate studies. She was placed on administrative leave in 2023. In May of this year, Gino was formally fired, and became the first Harvard professor to lose tenure since the 1940s, the Harvard Crimson reported.

Gino has long been fighting back against Harvard in court, alleging discrimination based on sex and defamation.

This recent countersuit Harvard filed against Gino, however, is focused on a data set that Gino brought forward in an attempt to exonerate herself from the initial allegations that led to her firing. In a response to the suit filed earlier this month, Gino claimed the data set would clear her name and argued that Harvard’s countersuit was an act of retaliation. The university, for its part, said the file was “invented out of thin air.”

Harvard is seeking unspecified damages, accusing Gino of harming its reputation and costing the university financially by wasting money on fraudulent research.

The allegedly falsified data set that Gino brought forward in an effort to exonerate herself comes from a 2010 study examining how honest people are in filling out tax forms. The study found that a person’s level of honesty corresponded to where on the form — top, bottom, or not at all — they were asked to sign their names.

The research, published in 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed that those who signed at the top were more likely to be honest. But now, the validity of the whole experiment has been called in to question.

Multiple versions of the data set were found on Gino’s computer, none of which matched the set used in the published paper. After Harvard Business School’s 2023 inquiry into Gino’s research misconduct, the former professor claimed that the university never even read the data that would clear her name.

When the files were investigated again, a new version was discovered — a version that backs up Gino’s claims. But that file was actually saved in September 2023 and backdated to appear as though it was from July 2010.

University lawyers said that Gino, “impugned and discredited members of the Investigation Committee, eroded internal trust in investigation processes, and damaged external confidence in the Harvard processes for assessing claims of research misconduct.”

Some of Gino’s colleagues have stepped up to defend her, saying Harvard was unfair in its investigation process.