An Unsettling Hint at How Much Fraud Could Exist in Science

Updated at 5:24 p.m. ET on August 2, 2023

Two years ago, an influential 2012 of dishonesty co-authored by the social psychologist and best-selling author Dan Ariely came under scrutiny. A group of scientists argued on their blog that some of the underlying data—describing the numbers of miles that a car-insurance company’s customers reported having driven—had been faked, “.” The academic featuring that study, which described three separate experiments and had five co-authors in all, was not long after. At the time, Ariely said that the figures in question had been shared with him by the insurance company, and that he had no idea they might be wrong: “I can see why it is tempting to think that I had something to do with creating the data in a fraudulent, “but I didn’t.”