The Fall of a Superstar Psychologist

Dan Ariely is a titan in the field of behavioral economics. His work has been published in numerous peer reviewed journals and routinely cited in academia and popular media. He has consulted for top companies and governments internationally. While still revered in the mainstream, academics are beginning to question the foundations of Ariely's work. Are his most influential findings robust, and more importantly, could they be fraudulent?

Corrections: The Israeli Ministry of Finance paid Ariely 17 million ILS (not USD). This amounts to 4.65 million USD.
While reading the emails at 10:25 and 10:51 I accidentally read Aimee's response before reading Dan's original question. Thanks to those who pointed out the mistakes.

Thank you for watching my first video.

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Music: brooks xy

Sources:

Huge kudos to the researchers at data colada for their continued commitment to the integrity of academic research. Read their work at:

#behavioraleconomics #behavioralscience #economics #psychology #research #academia #data #datascience

[_quant]

Since publishing the video, 2 errors have been brought to my attention:

First: The Israeli Ministry of Finance paid Ariely 17 million ILS (not USD). This amounts to 4.65 million USD.

Second: While reading the emails at 10:25 and 10:51 I accidentally read Aimee's response before reading Dan's original question. 

Thanks to those who pointed out the mistakes. I will be more thorough in checking for errors next time.

[ConWolfDoubleO]

This is why we seriously need to accept non-significant findings. Not finding a correlation is still useful information, but no one wants to put money into something to say you didn't find anything. And the "publish or perish" is completely true. Professors are expected to not only teach classes, but to publish a paper at least once a year in order to keep their job. Teaching and research should both be full-time commitments, otherwise both end up half-assed.

[dantaehiruma]

This Ariely dude appeared in HBO's documentary on Elizabeth Holmes and provides some bizare moral justification for Holmes' scam. Now I realize why. He was giving justification for his own scam.

[chrispysaid]

My god, that background song you chose is making me want to destroy every trumpet in existence

[santherstat]

as someone doing academic research, not getting IRB approval is insane. Not getting IRB approval for an experiment that SHOCKS PEOPLE is even crazier

[TheVeraciety]

Academic honesty needs to be extremely promoted. I’m tired of loud fabricators getting the advantage over quiet diligent truth-tellers.

[fattsteve]

The music being on an eight second loop is the perfect length to induce psychotic rage. My experiments prove it

[susieusmaximus]

My big question is whether journalists are ever going to learn that one study, by itself, no matter how interesting its findings are, means very little unless and until its findings are replicated.

[MedlifeCrisis]

Nice work. Fraud is so common in modern academia for a number of reasons – I’ve covered it in medicine, but it’s everywhere…however my outsider’s perspective is that psychology is especially susceptible

[justanotherhappyhumanist]

9:00 in - A person signing every email of their’s with “irrationally yours” is the most annoying thing that I have seen in a long, long time.

And can you imagine how much more annoying it would be if that person had also been harassing you for a year, trying to gaslight you, trying to drag you into their scummy scam of a mess, and get you to lie for them about their fraudulent study! Poor Aimee.

She must have wanted to throw her device against the wall after seeing a year’s worth of those “irrationally yours” signatures. No wonder she blocked him.

[johnsanko]

The irony of Ariely and the Harvard psych professor both having fraudulently manipulated data in reseadch on honesty would be hilarious if it wasn't so infuriating.

[britnicox]

The email chain with Amy is really so funny (and kind of insidious if you look too hard) because he is trying so hard to get her into maybe conceding something happened and she’s like NO GO AWAY

[swarple]

Love how Aimee wasn’t buying any of his crap. You can tell he’s trying to gaslight her (“ohhh I’m sure this thing happened it definitely did you just might have forgotten right?”) but she isn’t having it. It was satisfying, seeing her politely but firmly deny him what he wants. You can tell she’s pissed lol

[shibasurfing]

One of the PIs of the (physics) lab I did research in as an undergrad had her career impacted by the Schön scandal. She spent several years of her PhD trying in vain to replicate his false results. Academic dishonesty is absolutely vile.

[fromchomleystreet]

The irony is turned up to eleven. His whole area of expertise is “honesty”. In describing the way the profit motive incentivises dentists to “find” cavities that aren’t there, he’s actually describing perfectly how he was incentivised to “find” that alleged fact about dentists.

[lucasbaird]

I had a professor have us read his book a few years ago, and she pointed out to us that his work was likely not completely true. Which totally shocked me at the time, especially from a book my professor recommended to us, but I thought it was an interesting lesson in itself.

[sinyud]

I worked in academic research for over a decade. I lost count how many times I saw sloppy data analysis discover signals that didn’t actually exist. If you give one dataset to a thousand grad students, one of them will manage to interpret the noise as a signal. That student will get the publication and advance their career.
I work in industry now.

[pilotjoe]

I can’t overstate how big of an issue academic honesty is. Companies, governments, and ngo’s rely on replicating results. More and more studies are shown to be fraudulent, resulting in poor products for citizens.

Also: TED is pay to present, same goes for anything FORBES. Source: my last job bought several of each.

[Headhunter_]

That horn theme playing on an endless loop… dude you’re killing me.

[andrewjpalla]

I fucking love the drama of seeing emails exchanged between two academic professionals.