Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update) | Freakonomics Radio

Probably not — the incentives are too strong. But a few reformers are trying. We check in on their progress, in an update to an episode originally published last year. (Part 2 of 2) You can find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/can-academic-fraud-be-stopped-update/ FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bKm0cf

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. This is the second and final part of a series we are revisiting from last year. Stick around for an update at the end of the episode.

• 0:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Last week's episode was called "Why is there so much fraud in academia?" We heard about the alleged fraudsters. We heard about the whistleblowers and then a lawsuit against the whistleblowers.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  My very first thoughts were like, "Oh, my God. How's anyone gonna be able to do this again?"

• 0:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  We heard about feelings of betrayal from a co-author, who was also a longtime friend of the accused.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  We once even got to the point of our two families making an offer to a developer on a project to have houses connected to each other.

• 0:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  We also heard an admission from inside the house that the house is on fire.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  If you were just a rational agent acting in the most self-interested way possible as a researcher in academia, I think you would cheat.

• 1:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  That episode was a little gossipy, for us at least. Today, we are back to wonky. But don't worry, it is still really interesting. Today, we look into the academic research industry. And believe me, it is an industry. And there is misconduct everywhere, from the universities.

• 1:30Speaker 04

  The most likely career path for anyone who has committed misconduct is a long and fruitful career. Because most people, if they're caught at all, they skate.

• 1:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's misconduct at academic journals, some of which are essentially fake.

• 1:46Speaker 04

  There may be something that sounds a lot less nefarious than what I just described, but that is actually what's happening.

• 1:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And we'll hear how the rest of us contribute. Because after all, we love these research findings.

• 2:00Speaker 04

  You know, "You wear red, you must be angry." Or "If it says that, this is definitely a cure for cancer."

• 2:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll also hear from the reformers, who are trying to push back.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  It was a tense few months, but in the end, I was allowed to continue doing what I was doing.

• 2:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can academic fraud be stopped? Let's find out.

• 2:26Speaker 05

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 2:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Last week, we heard about two alleged cases of data fraud from two separate researchers in one paper. The paper claimed that if you ask people to sign a form at the top before they fill out the information, you will get more truthful answers than if they sign at the bottom. After many unsuccessful attempts to replicate this finding and allegations that the data supporting it had been faked, the original paper was finally retracted. The two alleged fraudsters are Dan Ariely of Duke and Francesca Gino, who has been suspended by Harvard Business School. Gino subsequently sued Harvard, as well as the three other academic researchers who blew the whistle.

• 3:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  The lawsuit against the researchers was dismissed. The whistleblowers maintain a blog called Data Collada. They have written that they believe there is fake data in many of the papers that Francesca Gino co-authored, perhaps dozens. Gino and Ariely, meanwhile, both maintain their innocence. They also both declined our request for an interview. On that one paper that caused all the trouble about signing at the top, there were three other co-authors: Lisa Shu, Nina Mazzar, and Max Bazerman. None of them have been accused of any wrongdoing. So let's pick up where we left off with Max Bazerman, the most senior researcher on that paper. He also teaches at Harvard Business School.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  When there's somebody who engages in bad behavior, there's always people around who could have noticed more and acted more.

• 4:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bazerman was close with Francesca Gino. He had been her advisor, and he trusted her. So he has been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the mess. He recently published a book called Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop. And he's working on another book about social science fraud. This has led him to consider what makes people cheat. Let's take the case of Didier Schtoppl, a Dutch professor of social psychology, who, after years of success, admitted to fabricating and manipulating data in dozens of studies.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Part of the path toward data fabrication occurred in part because he liked complex ideas. And academia didn't like complex ideas as much as they liked the snappy sort of clickbait. And that moved him in that direction and also put him on the path toward fraudulent behavior.

• 5:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  So here's something that Schtoppl wrote later when he wrote a book of confession, essentially, about his fraud. He wrote, "I was doing fine, but then I became impatient, overambitious, reckless. I wanted to go faster and better and higher and smarter all the time. I thought it would help if I just took this one tiny little shortcut, but then I found myself more and more often in completely the wrong lane. In the end, I wasn't even on the road at all." What struck me about that, and I think about that with Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino as well, which is that the people who have been accused of having committed academic fraud are really successful already. And I'm curious what that tells you about either the stakes, or the incentives, or

• 6:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  maybe the psychology of how this happens, because honestly, it surprises me.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  I would say we don't know that much about why the fraudsters do what they do. And the most interesting source you just mentioned, so Schtoppl wrote a book in Dutch called "Outsporing," which means something like derailed, where he provides his information. And he goes on from the material you talked about to describing that he became like an alcoholic or a heroin addict. And he got used to the easy successes. And he began to believe that he wasn't doing any harm. After all, he was just making it easier to publish information that was undoubtedly true. So this aspect of sort of being lured onto the path of unethical behavior, followed by-

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Addictive-like behavior becomes part of the story. And Schappe goes on to talk about lots of other aspects like the need to score, ambition, laziness, wanting power, status. So he provides this good insight. But most of the admitted fraudsters or the people who have lost their university positions based on allegations of fraud have simply disappeared and have never talked about it. One of the interesting parts is that Mark Hauser, who resigned from Harvard, and Ariely and Gino, who are alleged to have committed fraud by some parties, all three of them wrote on the topic of moral behavior and specifically why people might engage in bad behavior.

• 7:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's right. A lot of the fraud and suspected fraud comes from researchers who explore fraud. In 2012, Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely collaborated on another paper called "The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest." They wrote, "We propose that a creative personality and a creative mindset promote individuals' ability to justify their behavior, which in turn leads to unethical behavior." So just how much unethical behavior is there in the world of academic research? That's a hard question to answer precisely, but let's start with this man.

• 8:20Speaker 04

  I essentially spend all of my nights and weekends thinking about scientific fraud, scientific misconduct, scientific integrity, for that matter.

• 8:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ivan Oransky is a medical doctor and editor of a neuroscience publication called The Transmitter. He's also a distinguished journalist in residence at NYU, and on the side, he runs a website called Retraction Watch.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  We hear from whistleblowers all the time, people we call sleuths, who are actually out there finding these problems. And often that's pre-retraction, or they'll explain to us why retraction happened. We also do things like file public records requests.

• 8:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  He began retraction watch in 2010 with Adam Marcus, another science journalist. Marcus had broken a story about a Massachusetts anesthesiologist named Scott Rubin. Rubin had received funding from several drug companies to conduct clinical trials, but instead, he faked the data and published results without running the trials.

• 9:18Speaker 04

  I went to Adam and I said, what if we created a blog about this? It seems like there are all these stories that are hiding in plain sight that essentially, we and other journalists are leaving on the table. And when we looked at the actual retraction notices, the information was somewhere between misleading and opaque.

• 9:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you mean by that?

• 9:39Speaker 04

  So when a paper is retracted, and it's probably worth defining that, a retraction is a signal to the scientific community, or really to any readers of a particular peer-reviewed journal article, that you should not rely on that anymore, that there's something about it that means you should, you know, you can not pretend it doesn't exist, but you shouldn't base any other work on it.

• 10:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  But when you call it misleading or opaque, you're saying the explanation for the retraction is often not transparent.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Right, so when you retract a paper, you're supposed to put a retraction notice on it, the same way when you correct an article in the newspaper, you're supposed to put a correction notice on it. But when you actually read these retraction notices, and to be fair, this has changed a fair amount in the 13 years that we've been doing this, sometimes they include no information at all, sometimes they include information that is woefully incomplete, sometimes it's some version of, you know, getting Al Capone on tax evasion. You know, they faked the data, but we're going to say they forgot to fill out this form, which, you know, is still a reason to retract, but isn't the whole story.

• 10:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let's say we back up and I ask you, how significant or widespread is the problem of, we'll call it academic fraud?

• 10:57Speaker 04

  So we think that probably 2% of papers should be retracted for something that would be considered either out and out fraud, or maybe just severe bad mistake. According to our data, which we have the most retraction data of any database, about 0.1% of the world's literature is retracted. So one in a thousand papers. We think it should be about 20 times that, about 2%. There's a bunch of reasons, but they come down to one. There was a survey back in 2009, which has been repeated and done differently and come up with roughly the same number, actually even higher numbers recently, that says 2%

• 11:39Speaker 04

  of researchers, if you ask anonymously, they will say, yes, I've committed something that would be considered misconduct. Of course, when you ask them how many people they know who have committed misconduct, it goes much, much higher than that. And so that's one line of evidence, which is admittedly indirect. The other is that when you talk to the sleuths, the people doing the real work of figuring out what's wrong with literature and letting people know about it, they keep lists of papers they've flagged for publishers and for authors in journals. And routinely, most of them are not retracted. Again, we came to 2%. Is it exactly 2%? And is that even the right number? No, we're pretty sure that's the lower bound. Others say it should be even higher.

• 12:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Retraction Watch has a searchable database that includes more than 45,000 retractions from journals in just about any academic field you can imagine. They also post a leaderboard, a ranking of the researchers with the most papers retracted. At the top of that list is another anesthesiologist, this one a German researcher named Joachim Bolt. He came up briefly in last week's episode, too. Bolt has had more than 200 papers retracted.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Bolt, anesthesiology researcher, was studying something called heterostat, which was essentially a blood substitute. Not exactly blood, but something that when you were on like a heart-lung pump, a machine, during certain surgeries, or you're in the ICU or something like that, it would basically cut down on the amount of blood transfusions people would need. And that's got obvious benefits. Now, he did a lot of the important work in that area, and his work was cited in all the guidelines. It turned out that he was faking data.

• 13:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bolt was caught in 2010 after an investigation by a German state medical association. The method he had been promoting was later found to be associated with a significant increased risk of mortality. So in this case, the fraud led to real danger. And what happened to Bolt?

• 13:42Speaker 04

  He at one point was under criminal indictment, or at least criminal investigation. That didn't go anywhere. The hospital, the clinic also, which to be fair, had actually identified a lot of the problems, they came under pretty severe scrutiny. But in terms of actual sanctions, pretty minimal.

• 13:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  You've written that universities protect fraudsters. Can you give an example other than Bolt, let's say?

• 14:05Speaker 04

  So universities, they protect fraudsters in a couple of different ways. One is that they are very slow to act, they're very slow to investigate, and they keep all of those investigations hidden. The other is that because lawyers run universities, like they frankly run everything else, they tell people who are involved in investigations, if someone calls for a reference later, let's say someone leaves and they haven't been quite found guilty, but as a plea bargain sort of thing, they will leave and then they'll stop the investigation. Then when someone calls for a reference, and we actually have the receipts on this because we filed public records requests for emails between different parties, we

• 14:47Speaker 04

  learned that they would be routinely told not to say anything about the misconduct.

• 14:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's just take three of the most recent high-profile cases of academic fraud or accusations of academic fraud. We've got Francesca Gino, who was a psychology researcher at Harvard Business School, Dan Ariely, who's a psychologist at Duke, and then Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who was president of Stanford, a medical researcher. Three pretty different outcomes, right? Tessier-Lavigne was defenestrated from his presidency, Gino was suspended by HBS, and Dan Ariely, who's had accusations lobbed at him for years now, is just kind of going on. Can you just comment on that heterogeneity?

• 15:26Speaker 04

  So, and I would just, not so much as a correction, but just to say that yes, Marc Tessier-Lavigne was defenestrated as president. He remains, at least at the time of this discussion, a tenured professor at Stanford, which is a pretty nice position to be in.

• 15:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  A Stanford report found that Tessier Levine didn't commit fraud or falsify any of his data, although work in his labs, quote, "fell below customary standards of scientific rigor," and multiple members of his labs appear to have manipulated research data. Dan Ariely also remains a professor at Duke, and Duke has declined to comment publicly on whether an investigation into the allegations of data fraud even occurred. As Ivan Aransky told us, universities are run by lawyers.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  I've been quoted saying that the most likely career path, or the most likely outcome for anyone who has committed misconduct is a long and fruitful career. And I mean that because it's true. Because most people, if they're caught at all, they skate. The number of cases we write about, which, you know, grows every year, but is still a tiny fraction of what's really going on. Dan Ariely, we interviewed Dan years ago about some questions in his research. Duke is actually, I would argue, a little bit of a singular case. Duke in 2019 settled with the US government for $112.5 million because they had repeatedly

• 16:58Speaker 04

  alleged to have covered up really bad significant misconduct.

• 17:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Duke has had particular trouble with medical research. There was one physician researcher who faked the data in his cancer research. There were allegations of federal grant money being mishandled, also failing to protect patients in some studies. At one point, the National Institutes of Health placed special sanctions on all Duke researchers.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  So I gotta be honest, and, you know, people in Durham may not like me saying this, but I think Duke has a lot of work to do to demonstrate that their investigations are complete and that they are doing the right thing by research dollars and for patients.

• 17:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Most of the researchers we have been talking about are already well-established in their fields. If they feel pressure to get a certain result, it's probably the kind of pressure that comes with further burnishing your high status. But junior researchers face a different kind of pressure. They need published papers to survive. Publish or perish is the old saying. If they can't consistently get their papers in a good journal, they probably won't get tenure and they may not even have a career. And those journals are flooded with submissions. So the competition is fierce and it is global. This is easy to miss if

• 18:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  you're in the US, since so many of the top universities and journals are here. But academic research is very much a global industry and it's also huge. Even if you are a complete nerd and you can name 50 journals in your field, you know nothing. Every year, more than 4 million articles are published in somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 journals, depending on how you count, and that number is always growing. You have got journals called Aggressive Behavior and Frontiers in Ceramics, Neglected Tropical Diseases, and Rangifer,

• 19:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  which covers the biology and management of reindeer and caribou. There used to be a Journal of Mundane Behavior, but that one sadly is defunct. But no matter how many journals there are, there is never enough space for all the papers. And this has led to some, well, let's call it scholarly innovation. Here again is Ivan Oransky.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  People are now really fixated on what are known as paper mills. So if you think about the economics of this, right? It is worthwhile, if you are a researcher, to actually pay, in other words, it's an investment in your own future, to pay to publish a certain paper. What I'm talking about is literally buying a paper, or buying authorship on a paper. So, to give you a little bit of a sense of how this might work, you're a researcher who is about to publish a paper. So, you know, doesn't there at all have got, you know, some interesting finding that you've actually written up and a journal has accepted, it's gone through peer review?

• 20:10Speaker 04

  And you're like, great, and that's good for you, but you actually also want to make a little extra money on the side. So you take that paper, that essentially, it's not a paper yet, it's really still a manuscript, you put it up on a brokerage site, or you put the title up on a brokerage site, you say, "I've got a paper where, you know, there are four authors right now, it's going into this journal, which is a top tier, or mid-tier, whatever it is, etc., it's in this field, if you would like to be an author, the bidding starts now, or it's just, it's $500, or 500 euros, or wherever it is." And then Ivan Oransky comes along and says, "I need a paper, I need to get tenure, I need to get promoted." "Oh, great, let me click on this, you know, brokerage site, let me give you $500." And

• 20:55Speaker 04

  now, all of a sudden, you write to the journal, "By the way, I have a new author, his name is Ivan Oransky, he's at New York University, he just joined late, but he's been so invaluable to the process."

• 21:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, what do the other co-authors have to say about this?

• 21:09Speaker 04

  Often, they don't know about it, or at least they claim they don't know about it.

• 21:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  What about fraudulent journals? Do those exist, or fraudulent publication sites that look legit enough to pass muster for somebody's department?

• 21:21Speaker 04

  They do. I mean, there are a couple different versions of fraudulent with a lowercase "f" publications. There are publications that are legit, in the sense that they can point to doing all the things that you're supposed to do as a journal, you have papers submitted, you do something that looks sort of like peer review, you assign it what's known as a digital object identifier, you do all that publishing stuff. And they're not out and out fraudulent in the sense of they don't exist and people are just making it up, or they're trying to, you know, use a name that isn't really theirs, but they're fraudulent with lowercase "f" in the sense that they're not doing most of those things. Then there are actual, what we refer to, we and Anna Abolkina, who works with us on this, as hijacked journals. We have more than 200 on this list now.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  They were at one point legitimate journals. So it's a real title that some university or funding agency or et cetera will actually recognize. But what happened was some version of the publisher sort of forgot to renew their domain. I mean, literally something like that. Now, there are more nefarious versions of it, but it's that sort of thing where, you know, these really bad players are inserting themselves and taking advantage of the vulnerabilities in the system, of which there are many, to really print money. Because then they can get people to pay them to publish in those journals, and they even are getting indexed in the places that matter.

• 22:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  It sounds like there are thousands of people who are willing to pay journals that are quasi-real to publish their papers.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  At least thousands, yes.

• 22:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Who are the kind of authors who would publish in those journals? Are they American, not American, or there are particular fields or disciplines that happen to be most common?

• 23:07Speaker 04

  Well, I think what it tends to correlate with is how direct or intense the publisher parish culture is in that particular area. And generally, that varies more by country or region than anything else. If you look at, for example, the growth in China of number of papers published, what's calculated is the impact of those papers, which relies on things like how often they're cited. You can trace that growth very directly from government mandates. For example, if you publish in certain journals, or known as high impact factor, you actually got a cash bonus that was a sort of multiple of the number of the impact factor.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  And that can make a big difference in your life.

• 23:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Recent research by John Yenides, Thomas Collins, and Yarun Bas has examined what they call extremely productive authors. They left out physicists, since some physics projects are so massive that one paper can have more than 5,000 authors. So leaving aside the physicists, they found that over the course of one year, more than 1,200 researchers around the world published the equivalent of one paper every five days. The top countries for these extremely productive authors were China, the US, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and Germany. When there is so much research being published, you'd also expect that the vast majority of it is never read by more than a handful of people.

• 24:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's also the problem, as the economics blogger Noah Smith recently pointed out, that too much academic research is just useless, at least to anyone beyond the author. But you shouldn't expect any of this to change. Global scholarly publishing is a $28 billion market. Everyone complains about the very high price of journal subscriptions, but universities and libraries are essentially forced to pay. There is, however, another business model in the research paper industry, and it is growing fast. It's called open access publishing. And here, it's most often the authors who pay to get into the journal.

• 25:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you think that sounds problematic, well, yes. Consider Hindawi, an Egyptian publisher with more than 200 journals, including the Journal of Combustion, the International Journal of Ecology, the Journal of Advanced Transportation. Most of their journals were not at all prestigious, but that doesn't mean they weren't lucrative. A couple of years ago, Hindawi was bought by John Wiley & Sons, the huge American academic publisher, for nearly $300 million.

• 25:50Speaker 04

  So Hindawi's business model was they're an open access publisher, which usually means you charge authors to publish in your journal, and you charge them, you know, it could be anywhere from hundreds of dollars to even thousands of dollars per paper. And they're publishing, you know, tens of thousands and sometimes even more papers per year. So you can start to do that math. What happened at Hindawi was that somehow, paper mills realized that they were vulnerable. So they started targeting them. They've actually started paying some of these editors to accept papers from their paper mill. And, long story short, they now have had to retract something like, we're still figuring out the exact numbers when it does settles, but in the thousands.

• 26:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  In 2023, Hindawi retracted more than 8,000 papers. That was more retractions than there had ever been in a year from all academic publishers combined. Wiley recently announced that they will stop using the Hindawi brand name and they folded the remaining Hindawi journals into their portfolio. But they are not getting out of the pay to publish business.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  Publishers earn more from publishing more. It's a volume play. And when you're owned by shareholders who want growth all the time, that is the best way to grow. And these are businesses with very impressive and enviable profit margins of sometimes up to 40%. And these are not on small numbers. The profit itself is in the billions often.

• 27:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's hard to blame publishers for wanting to earn billions from an industry with such bizarre incentives. But if publishers aren't looking out for the integrity of the research, who is? That's coming up after the break. I'm Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio.

• 27:50Speaker 06

  We feel like when we're in cultures, that there is no way for any of us to change the culture. It's a culture. My God, how could we change it? But we also recognize that cultures are created by the people that comprise them. And the notion that we collectively can actually do something to shift the research culture, I think, has spread. And that spreading has actually accelerated the change of the research culture for the better.

• 28:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Brian Noosick. He's a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and he runs the Center for Open Science. For more than a decade, his center has been trying to get more transparency in academic research. You might think there would already be transparency in academic research, at least I did. But here's what Noosick said in part one of the series, when we were talking about how researchers tend to hoard their data rather than share it.

• 28:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's based on the academic reward system. Publication is the currency of advancement. I need publications to have a career, to advance my career, to get promoted. And so the work that I do that leads to publication, I have a very strong sense of, oh, my gosh, if others now have control of this, my ideas, my data, my designs, my solutions, then I will disadvantage my career.

• 29:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  I asked Nosek how he thinks this culture can be changed.

• 29:22Speaker 06

  So, for example, we have to make it easy for researchers to be more transparent with their work. If it's really hard to share your data, then adding on that extra work is going to slow down my progress. We have to make it normative. People have to be able to see that others in their community are doing this, they're being more transparent, they're being more rigorous, so that we, instead of saying, oh, that's great ideals and nobody does it, you say, oh, there's somebody over there that's doing it. Oh, maybe I could do it, too. We have to deal with the incentives. Is it actually relevant for my advancement in my career to be transparent, to be rigorous, to be reproducible? And then we have to address the policy framework.

• 30:02Speaker 06

  If it's not embedded in how it is that funders decide who to fund, institutions decide who to hire, journals to decide what to publish, then it's not going to be internally and completely embedded in the system.

• 30:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so that is a lot of change. Here's one problem Nosek and his team are trying to address. Some researchers will cherry pick or otherwise manipulate their data or find ways to goose their results to make sure they come up with a finding that will capture the attention of journal editors. So Nosek's team created a software platform called the Open Science Framework, where researchers can pre-register their project and their hypothesis before they start collecting data.

• 30:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the idea is you register your designs and you've made that commitment in advance. And then as you're carrying out the research, if things change along the way, which happens all the time, you can update that registration. You could say, here's what's changing. We didn't anticipate that going into this community was going to be so hard, and here's how we had to adapt. That's fine. You should be able to change. You just have to be transparent about those changes so that the reader can evaluate.

• 31:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then those data are timestamped together?

• 31:20Speaker 06

  Exactly. Yeah, you put your data in your materials. If you did a survey, you add the surveys. If you did behavioral tasks, you can add those. So all of that stuff can be attached then to the registration so that you have a more comprehensive record of what it is you did.

• 31:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  It sounds like you're basically raising the cost of sloppiness or fraud, yes?

• 31:41Speaker 06

  It makes fraud more inconvenient. And that's actually a reasonable intervention. I don't think any intervention that we could design could prevent fraud in a way that doesn't stifle actual legitimate research. We just want to make visible all the things that legitimate researchers are doing so that someone that doesn't want to do that extra work has a harder time. And eventually, if everything is exposed, then the person who would be motivated to do fraud might say, well, it's just as easy to do the research the real way, so I guess I'll do that.

• 32:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  The idea of preregistration isn't new. It goes back to at least the late 19th century, but there is a big appetite for it now. The Data Calada team came up with their own version. Here is Yuri Simonson from the Asade Business School in Barcelona.

• 32:32Speaker 07

  It's a platform that we launched. It's called As Predicted. And it's basically eight questions that people write, your co-author sign on it, it's timestamped, people, you can show the PDF. And when we launched it, we thought, okay, when do we call this a failure? You know, thinking ahead, when do you shut down the website? All right, if we don't get 100 a year, we're going to call it failure. And we're getting about 140 a day now.

• 32:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Brian Nosek says the registered report model can be especially helpful to the journals.

• 33:02Speaker 06

  So in the standard publishing model, I do all of my research. I get my findings, I write it up in a paper and I send it to the journal. In that model, the reward system is about the findings. I need to get those findings to be as positive, novel and tidy as I can so that you, the reviewer, say, okay, okay, you can publish it. That's dysfunctional and it leads to all of those practices that might lead the claims to be more exaggerated than the evidence. The registered report model says to the journal, you are going to submit, Brian, the methodology that you're thinking about doing and why you're asking that question and the background research supporting that question being important and that methodology being an effective methodology. We'll review that. We don't know what the results are.

• 33:47Speaker 06

  You don't know what the results are, but we're going to review based on, do you have an important question?

• 33:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So this is almost like before you build a house, you're going to show us your plan and we're the building department. We're going to come and say, yeah, that looks legit. It's not going to collapse. It's not going to infringe on your neighbor and so on. Is that the idea?

• 34:04Speaker 06

  Exactly. And the key part is that the reward, me getting that publication, is based on you agreeing that I'm asking an important question and I've designed an effective method to test it. It's no longer about the results. None of us know what the results are.

• 34:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  And so even if the results are uninteresting, not new, et cetera, we'll know they're legitimate. But there would seem to be a conflict of incentive there, which is that, oh, now do I need to publish this uninteresting, not new result? What do you do about that?

• 34:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the commitment that the journal makes is we're going to publish it regardless of outcome and the authors are making that commitment too. We're going to carry this out as we said we would and we'll report what happens. Now, an interesting thing happens in the change of the culture here in evaluating research because you said, well, if it's an uninteresting finding, do we still have to publish it? It turns out that when you have to make a decision of whether to publish or not before knowing that the results are, the orientation that the reviewers bring, that the authors bring is, do we need to know the answer to this? Regardless of what happens, do we need to know the answer? Is the question important, in other words?

• 35:16Speaker 06

  Exactly. Is the question important enough that we need evidence, regardless of what the evidence is? And it dramatically shifts what ends up being published. So in the early evidence with registered reports, more than half of the hypotheses that are proposed end up not being supported in the final paper. In the standard literature, comparable type of domains, more than 95% of the hypotheses are supported in the paper. You wonder in the standard literature, if we're always right, why do we bother doing the research? Right? Our hypotheses are always right. And of course, it's laughable because we know that's not what's actually happening. We know that all that failed stuff is getting left out, and we're not seeing it.

• 36:01Speaker 06

  And the actual literature is an exaggeration of what the real literature is.

• 36:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  I think we should say a couple of things here about academia. The best academics are driven by a real scientific impulse. They may know a lot, but they're not afraid to admit how much we still don't know. So they're driven by an urge to investigate and not, not necessarily at least, an urge to produce a result that will increase their own status. But academia is also an extraordinarily status-conscious place. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. If status is the reward that encourages a certain type of smart, disciplined person to do research for the sake of research, rather than taking their talents to an industry that might pay them much more,

• 36:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  that is fantastic. But if the pursuit of status for status's sake leads an academic researcher to cheat, well, yeah, that's bad.

• 37:04Speaker 07

  I mean, the incentives are part of the problem, but I don't think it's a part of the problem that we have to fix.

• 37:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, again, is Yuri Simonson from Data Kalada.

• 37:12Speaker 07

  I think the incentives... It's like avoid people rob banks because their incentives are there, but it doesn't mean we should stop, you know, rewarding cash. It just, we should, you know, make our saves safer because it's good for cash to buy things. And it's good for people who publish interesting findings to get recognition.

• 37:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Brian Nosek says that more than 300 journals are now using the registered reports model.

• 37:36Speaker 06

  I think there is broad buy in on the need to change. And it has already hit the mainstream of many of the changes that we promote. Sharing data, materials, code, pre-registering research, reporting all outcomes. So we're in the scaling phase for those activities. And what I am optimistic about is that there is this meta-science community that is interrogating whether these solutions are actually having the desired impact. And so this is the most exciting part of the movement as I'm looking to the future is this dialogue between activism and reform. We can do these things, let's make these changes and meta-science and evaluation.

• 38:21Speaker 06

  Is this working? Did you do what you said it's going to do and et cetera? And I hope that the tightness of that loop will stay tight because that I think will make for a very healthy discipline that is constantly skeptical of itself and constantly looking to do better.

• 38:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is Brian Nosek too optimistic? Maybe 300 journals is a great start, but that represents maybe 1% of all journals. For journals and authors, the existing publishing incentives are very strong.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  So I think journals have really complicated incentives.

• 39:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Samin Vazir, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  Of course, they want to publish good work to begin with. So there's some incentive to do some quality check and kind of cover their ass there. But once they publish something, there's a strong incentive for them to defend it or at least to not publicize any errors.

• 39:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  And here's a reason to think that Brian Nosek is right to be optimistic about research reform.

• 39:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some of his fellow reformers, including Samin Vazir, have been promoted into prestigious positions in their field. Vazir spent some time as editor in chief of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

• 39:41Speaker 03

  So one of the things editor in chief does is when a manuscript is submitted, I would read it and decide whether it should continue through the peer review process, or I could reject it there. And that's called desrejection. One thing I started doing at the journal that wasn't official policy, it was just a practice I decided to adopt, was that when a manuscript was submitted, I would hide the authors' names for myself. So I was rejecting things without looking at who the authors were. So the publication committee started a conversation with me, which is totally reasonable, about the overall desrejection rate, am I rejecting too many things, et cetera. There was some conversation about whether I was desrejecting the wrong people, so if I was stepping on important people's toes. And an email was forwarded to me from a quote unquote "award-winning" social psychologist. You know, Samin desrejected my paper, I found this extremely distasteful, and I won't be

• 40:25Speaker 03

  submitting there again. And when I would try to engage about the substance of my decisions, you know, the scientific basis for them, that wasn't what the conversation was about.

• 40:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  So it was basically like, do you know who I am?

• 40:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what happened to you and that journal, then?

• 40:41Speaker 03

  It was a tense few months, but in the end, I was allowed to continue doing what I was doing.

• 40:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Vazir recently took on the editor in chief job at a different journal, Psychological Science. It is one of the premier journals in the field. It's also the journal where Francesca Gino published two of her allegedly fraudulent papers. So I asked Vazir what changes she is hoping to make.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  We're expanding a team that used to have a different name, we're going to call them the Statistics Transparency and Rigor Editors, the STAR Editors. And so that team will be supplementing the handling editors, the editors who actually organize the peer review and make the decisions on submissions. Like, if a handling editor has a question about the data integrity, or about details of the methods, or things like that, the STAR editor team will provide their expertise and help fill in those gaps. We're also, I'm not sure exactly what form this will take, but try to incentivize more accurate and calibrated claims, and less hype and exaggeration. This is something that I think is particularly challenging with short articles, like Psychological Science publishes, and especially, you know, a journal that has really high rejection rate, where the vast majority of submissions are rejected.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Authors are competing for those few spots, and so it feels like they have to make a really bold claim. And so it's going to be very difficult to play this like back and forth where authors are responding to their perception of what the incentives are. So we need to convey to them that actually, if you go too far, make too bold of claims that aren't warranted, you will be more likely to get rejected. But I'm not sure if authors will believe that just because we say that. They're still competing for a very selective number of spots.

• 42:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  So as a journal editor, how do you think about the upside risk of publishing something new and exciting against the downside risk of being wrong?

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't mind being wrong. I think journalists should publish things that turn out to be wrong. It would be a bad thing to approach journal editing by saying, we're only going to publish true things or things that we're 100% sure are true. The important thing is that the things that are more likely to be wrong are presented in a more uncertain way. And sometimes we'll make mistakes even there. Sometimes we'll present things with certainty that we shouldn't have. What I would like to be involved in and what I plan to do is to encourage more post-publication critique and correction, reward the whistleblowers who identify errors that are valid and that need to be acted upon, and create more incentives for people to do that and do that well.

• 43:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  How would you reward whistleblowers?

• 43:04Speaker 03

  I don't know. Do you have any ideas?

• 43:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right now, the rewards for whistleblowers in academia may seem backwards. Remember, the Data Calata whistleblowers were sued by Francesca Gino, one of the people they blew the whistle on. They needed a GoFundMe campaign for their legal defense. So, no, the whistleblowers aren't collecting any bounties, nor do they cover themselves in any kind of glory.

• 43:33Speaker 08

  Stephen, I'm the person that walks into these academic conferences and everyone is like, oh, here comes Debbie Downer.

• 43:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Leif Nelson, another member of Data Calata. He's a professor of business administration at UC Berkeley. In a recent New Yorker piece by Gideon Lewis Krauss about these fraud scandals, Nelson and his Data Calata partners were described as having a, quote, "basic willingness to call bullsh**ed."

• 44:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  So now that you've become part of this group that are collectively, you know, I would think of as the primary whistleblower, or police, or steward, whatever word we want to use, against fraudulent research in the social sciences, what does that feel like? I'm guessing on one level, it feels like an accomplishment. On the other hand, it makes me think of a police force where there's the Internal Affairs Bureau, where detectives are put to find the bad apples. And even though everybody's in favor of rooting out the bad apples, everybody kind of hates the I A B guys. And I'm curious what the emotional toll or cost has been to you.

• 44:47Speaker 08

  Wow.

• 44:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bad question?

• 44:51Speaker 08

  No, like, it reminds me of how stressful it all is. We struggle a little bit with thinking about analogies for what we do. We're definitely not police. Police, amongst other things, have institutional power. They have badges, whatever. We don't have any of that. We're not enforcers in any way. The Internal Affairs thing hurts a little bit, but I get it. Because that's saying, hey, within the behavioral science community, we're the people that are watching the behavioral scientists. And you're right, no one likes Internal Affairs. Most of our thinking is that we want to be journalists, that it's fun to investigate. That's true for everybody in the field, right? They're all curious about whatever it is they're studying. And so we're curious about this. And then when we find things that we think are interesting,

• 45:36Speaker 08

  we also want to talk about it, not just with each other, but with the outside world. But I don't identify as much with being a police officer or even a detective, though every now and then, people will compare us to something like Sherlock Holmes, and that feels more fun. But in truth, the reason I sort of wince at the question is that the vast majority of the time, it comes with far more burden than it does pleasure.

• 46:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Even before the lawsuit?

• 46:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, the lawsuit makes all of the like psychological burden into a concrete observable thing. But the part prior to that is that every time we report on anything, that's going to be like, well, look, we think something bad happened here. Someone is going to be mad at us. And probably more people are going to be. And I don't want people to be mad at me. And I think about some of the people involved. And it's hard because I know a lot of these people and I know their friends and I know the friends of the friends. And that carries real, real stress for I think all three of us.

• 46:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  In the New Yorker piece, there are still people who call you pretty harsh names. You've been compared to the Stasi, for instance.

• 46:47Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's real bad. I'm not happy with being compared to the Stasi. The optimistic take is that there's less of that than there used to be. When any of the three of us go and visit universities, for example, and we talk to doctoral students, and we talk to assistant professors, and we talk to associate professors, we talk to senior professors, the students basically all behave as though they don't understand why anyone would ever be against what we're saying. They wouldn't understand the Stasi thing. But they also wouldn't even understand like, why, they almost to the level, I don't understand why we're having you come for a talk. Doesn't everyone already believe this? But when I talk to people that are closer to retirement than they are to being a grad student, they're more like, you know, you're making waves where

• 47:31Speaker 08

  you don't need to, you're pushing back against something that's not there. We've been doing this for decades. Why fix what isn't broken? That sort of thing.

• 47:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  If they were to say that to you directly, why fix what isn't broken? What would you say?

• 47:43Speaker 08

  I would say, but it is broken.

• 47:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  And your evidence for that would be?

• 47:47Speaker 08

  Ah, the evidence for that is multi-fold.

• 47:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  After the break, multi-fold we shall. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

• 48:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can academic fraud be eliminated? Certainly not. The incentives are too strong. Also, to be reductive, cheaters are going to cheat. And I doubt there is one field of human endeavor, no matter how noble, or righteous, or honest it claims to be, where some cheating doesn't happen. But can academic fraud at least be greatly reduced? Perhaps. But that would likely require some big changes, including a new type of gatekeeper. Samin Vazir, the journal editor we heard from earlier, is one kind of gatekeeper.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  Sometimes, for example, we'll get a submission where the research is really solid, but the conclusion is too strong. And I'll sometimes tell authors, hey, look, I'll publish your paper if you tone down the conclusion, or even sometimes change the conclusion from saying there is evidence for my hypothesis to there's no evidence one way or the other, but it's still interesting data. And authors are not always willing to do that, even if it means getting a publication in this journal. So I do think that's a sign that, maybe it's a sign that they genuinely believe what they're saying, which is maybe to their credit. I don't know if that's good news or bad news. I think often when we're kind of overselling something, we probably believe what we're saying.

• 49:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  And there's another important gatekeeper in academic journals, one that we've barely talked about: the referees who assess journal submissions. Peer review is a bedrock component of what makes academic publishing so credible, at least in theory. But as we've been hearing about every part of this industry, the incentives for peer reviewers are also off. Here again is Ivan Aransky from Retraction Watch.

• 49:47Speaker 04

  If you add up the number of papers published every year, and then you multiply that times the two or three peer reviewers who are typically supposed to review those papers, and sometimes they go through multiple rounds, it's easily in the tens of millions of peer reviewers as a unit. And if each of those takes anywhere from four hours to eight hours of your life as an expert, which you don't really have because you've got to be teaching, you've got to be doing your own research. You come up with a number that cannot possibly be met by qualified people. Really, it can't. I mean, the math just doesn't work. And none of them are paid. You are sort of expected to do this because somebody will peer review your paper at some other point, which sort of makes sense until you really pick it apart.

• 50:30Speaker 04

  Now, peer reviewers, so even the best of them, and I'm by best, I mean, people who really sit and take the time and probe what's going on in the paper and look at all the data. But you can't always look at the data. In fact, most of the time, you can't look at the raw data, even if you had time, because the authors don't make it available. So peer review, it's become really peer review light, and maybe not even that, at the vast majority of journals. So it's no longer surprising that so much gets through the system that shouldn't.

• 51:00Speaker 08

  This is a very hot topic.

• 51:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that, again, is Leif Nelson from UC Berkeley and Data Kalata.

• 51:07Speaker 08

  Editors largely in my field are uncompensated for their job, and reviewers are almost purely uncompensated for their job. And so they're all doing it for the love of the field. And those jobs are hard. I'm an occasional reviewer and an occasional editor. And every time I do it, it's basically taxing. The first part of the job was reading a whole paper and deciding whether the topic was interesting, whether it was contextualized well enough that people would understand what it was about, whether the study as designed was good at testing the hypothesis as articulated. And only after you get past all of those levels would you say, OK, and now do they have evidence in favor of the hypothesis?

• 51:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  By the way, we have mostly been talking about the production side of academic research this whole time. What about the consumer side? All of us are also looking for the most interesting and useful studies, all of us in industry, in government, in the media, especially the media.

• 52:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's Ivan Oransky again.

• 52:15Speaker 04

  We have been conditioned, and in fact, because of our own attention economy, we end up covering studies overall else when it comes to science and medicine. I like to think that's changing a little bit. I hope it is. But we cover individual studies and we cover the studies that sound the most interesting or that have the biggest effect size and things like that. You know, you wear red, you must be angry, or if it says that this is definitely a cure for cancer. And journalists love that stuff. They lap it up.

• 52:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Like signing a document at the top will make you more likely to be honest on the form?

• 52:48Speaker 04

  Well, you may have heard about that.

• 52:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And on that note, I went back to Max Bazerman, one of the co-authors of that paper, which inspired this series. For Bazerman, the experience of getting caught up in fraud accusations was particularly bewildering because the accusations were against a collaborator and friend that he fully trusted, Francesca Gino.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  So, you know, when we think about Ponzi schemes, it's named after a guy named Ponzi, who was an Italian-American who preyed on the Italian-American community. And if we think about Bernie Madoff, he preyed on lots of people, but particularly many very wealthy Jewish individuals and organizations. One of the interesting things about trust is that it creates so many wonderful opportunities. So in the academic world, the fact that I can trust my colleagues means that we can diffuse the work to the person who can handle it best. So there's lots of enormous benefits from trust. But it's also true that if there's somebody out there who's going to commit a fraud of

• 53:56Speaker 02

  any type, those of us who are trusting that individual are perhaps in the worst position to notice that something's wrong. And quite honestly, Stephen, you know, I've been working with junior colleagues who are smarter than me and know how to do a variety of tasks better than me for such a long time. I've always trusted them. Certainly for junior colleagues, for the most new doctoral students, I may not have trusted their competence because they were still learning. But in terms of using the word trust in an ethical sense, I've never questioned the ethics of my colleagues. So this current episode has really hit me pretty, pretty heavily.

• 54:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can I tell you, Max, that is what upsets me about this scandal, even though I'm not an academic, but I've been writing about and interacting with academics for quite a while now. And the problem is that I maybe gave them overall too much credit. I considered academia one of the last bastions of, I mean, I do sound like a fool now when I say it, but one of the last bastions of honest, transparent, empirical behavior where you're bound by a sort of code that only very rarely would someone think about intentionally violating. I'm curious if you felt that way as well, that you were sort of played or were naive in retrospect?

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Undoubtedly, I was naive. You know, not only did I trust my colleagues on the signing first paper, but I think I've trusted my colleagues for decades. And hopefully, with a good basis for trusting them, I do want to highlight that there's so many benefits of trust. So the world has done a lot better because we trust science. And the fact that there's an occasional scientist who we shouldn't trust should not keep us from gaining the benefit that science creates. And so one of the harms created by the fraudsters is that they give credibility to the science deniers who are so often keeping us from making progress in society.

• 56:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's worth pointing out that scientific research findings have been refuted and overturned since the beginning of scientific research. That's part of the process. But what's happening at this moment, especially in some fields like social psychology, it can be disheartening. It's not just a replication crisis or a data crisis.

• 56:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a believability crisis. Samin Vazir acknowledges this.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  There were a lot of societal phenomena that we really wanted explanations for. And then social psych offered these kind of easy explanations, or maybe not so easy, but these relatively simple explanations that people wanted to believe just to have an answer and an explanation.

• 56:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So just how bad is the believability crisis? Danny Kahneman, who died last year, was perhaps the biggest name in academic psychology in a couple of generations, so big that he once won a Nobel Prize in economics. His work has been enormously influential in many fields and industries. But in a New York Times article about the Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely scandals, he said, "When I see a surprising finding, my default is not to believe it. 12 years ago, my default was to believe anything that was surprising." Here again is Max Bazerman, who was a colleague and friend of Kahneman's.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  I think that my generation fought against the open science movement for far too long, and it's time that we get on the bandwagon and realize that we need some pretty massive reform of how social science is done, not only to improve the quality of social science, but also to make us more credible with the world. So many of us are attracted to social science because we think we can make the world better. And we can't make the world better if the world doesn't believe our results anymore. So I think that we have a fundamental challenge to figure out, how do we go about doing that? In terms of training, I think that for a long time, if we think about training and research methods and statistics, that was more like the medicine that you have to take as part of becoming a social scientist.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  And I think we need to realize that it's a much more central and important topic. If we're going to be creating reproducible, credible social science, we need to deal with lots of the issues that the open science movement is telling us about. And we've taken too long to listen to their advice. So if we go from Data Kalata talking about P-hacking in 2011, you know, there were lots of hints that it was Time to start moving. And the field obviously has moved in the direction that Data Kalada and Brian Osek have moved us. And finally, we have Samin Vazir as a new incoming editor of Psych Science, which is sort of a fascinating development as well. So we're moving in the right direction.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  It's taken us too long to pay attention to the wise advice that the open science movement has outlined for us.

• 59:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  I do think there needs to be a reckoning. And that is Joe Simmons, the third member of the Data Kalada Collective. He teaches judgment and decision making at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  I think that people need to wake up and realize that the foundation of at least a sizable chunk of our field is built on something that's not true. And if a foundation of your field is not true, what does a good scientist do to break into that field? Like, imagine you have a whole literature that is largely false. And imagine that when you publish a paper, you need to acknowledge that literature. And that if you contradict that literature, your probability of publishing really goes down. What do you do? So what it does is it winds up weeding out the careful people who are doing true stuff. And it winds up rewarding the people who are cutting corners or even worse.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  So it basically becomes a field that reinforces rewards bad science and punishes good science and good scientists. Like, this is about an incentive system. And the incentive system is completely broken. And we need to get a new one. And the people in power who are reinforcing this incentive system, they need to not be in power anymore. You know, this is illustrating that there's sort of a rot at the core of some of the stuff that we're doing. And we need to put the right people who have the right values, who care about the details, who understand that the materials and the data, they are the evidence. We need those people to be in charge.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Like, there can't be this idea that these are one-off cases. They're not. They are not one-off cases. So it's broken. You have to fix it.

• 1:01:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  That again was Joe Simmons. Since we published this series last year, there have been reports of fraud in many fields, not just the behavioral sciences, but in botany, physics, neuroscience, and more. So we went back to Brian Nosek, who runs the Center for Open Science.

• 1:01:16Speaker 06

  There really is accelerating movement in the sense that some of the base principles of "we need to be more transparent, we need to improve data sharing, we need to facilitate the processes of self-correction" are not just head nods, "yeah, that's an important thing," but have really moved into, "yeah, how are we going to do that?" And so I guess that's been the theme of 2024, is how can we help people do it well?

• 1:01:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  At his center, Nosek is trying out a new plan.

• 1:01:48Speaker 06

  One of the more exciting things that we've been working on is a new initiative that we're calling "Life Cycle Journal." And the basic idea is to reimagine scholarly publishing without the original constraints of paper. A lot of how the peer review process and publishing occurs today was done because of the limits of paper. But in a world where we can actually communicate digitally, there's no reason that we need to wait till the research is done to provide some evaluation. There's no reason to consider it final when it could be easily revised and updated. There's no reason to think of review as a singular one

• 1:02:30Speaker 06

  set of activities by three people who judge the entire thing. And so we will have a full marketplace of evaluation services that are each evaluating the research in different ways. It'll happen across the research lifecycle, from planning through completion. And researchers will always be able to update and revise when errors or corrections are needed.

• 1:02:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  But the need for corrections can move in mysterious ways. Brian Nosek himself and collaborators, including Leif Nelson of Data Calata, had to retract a recent article about the benefits of preregistration after other researchers pointed out that their article hadn't properly preregistered all their hypotheses. Nosek was embarrassed.

• 1:03:16Speaker 06

  My whole life is about trying to promote transparent research practices, greater openness, trying to improve rigor and reproducibility. I am just as vulnerable to error as anybody else. And so, one of the real lessons, I think, is that without transparency, these errors will go unexposed. It would have been very hard for the critics to identify that we had screwed this up without being able to access the portions of the materials that we were able to make public. And as people are engaged with critique and pursuing transparency, and transparency is

• 1:03:57Speaker 06

  becoming more normal, we might, for a while, see an ironic effect, which is transparency seems to be associated with poorer research, because more errors are identified. And that ought to happen, because errors are occurring. Without transparency, you can't possibly catch them. But what might emerge over time, as our verification processes improve, as we have a sense of accountability to our transparency, then the fact that transparency is there may decrease error over time, but not the need to check. And that's the key.

• 1:04:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Still, trust in science in the US has been declining. So we asked Nosek if he is worried that this new transparency, which will likely uncover more errors, might hurt his cause.

• 1:04:48Speaker 06

  This is a real challenge that we wrestle with, and have wrestled with since the origins of the center, is how do we promote this culture of critique and self-criticism about our field? And simultaneously have that be understood as the strength of research, rather than its weakness. One of the phrases that I've liked to use in this is that the reason to trust science is because it doesn't trust itself. That part of what makes science great as a social system is its constant self-scrutiny and willingness to try to find and expose its errors, so that the evidence that comes

• 1:05:31Speaker 06

  out at the end is the most robust, reliable, valid evidence as could be. And that continuous process is the best process in the world that we've ever invented for knowledge production.

• 1:05:46Speaker 06

  We can do better. I think our mistake in some prior efforts of promoting science is to appeal to authority, saying you should trust science because scientists know what they're doing. I don't think that's the way to gain trust in science, because anyone can make that claim. Appeals to authority are very weak arguments. I think our opportunity as a field to address the skepticism of institutions generally and science specifically is to show our work, is by being transparent, by allowing the criticism to occur, by in fact encouraging and promoting critical engagement with our evidence. That is the

• 1:06:28Speaker 06

  playing field I'd much rather be on with people who are the so-called enemies of science than in competing appeals to authority. Because if they need to wrestle with the evidence and an observer says, wow, one group is totally avoiding the evidence and the other group is actually showing their work, I think people will know who to trust. That's easy to say. It's very hard to do. These are hard problems.

• 1:06:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  I agree. These are hard problems. To be fair, easy problems get solved, or they simply evaporate. It's the hard problems that keep us all digging. And we at Freakonomics Radio will keep digging in this new year. Thanks to Brian Noosick for the update. Thanks especially to you for listening. Coming up next time on the show. This sign right here is 12 foot tall. The economics of highway signs. And after that, some 30 million Americans think that they are allergic to the penicillin family of drugs, and the vast majority of them are not. Why does this matter?

• 1:07:37Speaker 09

  Nothing kills bacteria better than these drugs.

• 1:07:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  We go inside the bizarro world of allergies. That's coming up soon. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else, too.

• 1:07:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Alina Kuhlman. Our staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abawaji, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger, Jason Gambrell, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnars, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Sarah Lilly, Teo Jacobs, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. Our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

• 1:08:33Speaker 06

  We are a carrot-based organization because we don't have sticks.

• 1:08:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, would you like me to loan you a stick just once in a while?

• 1:08:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, that would be fun.

• 1:08:45Speaker 05

  The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

• 1:08:52Speaker 04

  Stitcher.