Mark Carrigan<p><strong>The dizzying scale of malpractice by behavioural scientists in business schools</strong></p><p>I wrote earlier in the year about the <a href="https://markcarrigan.net/2024/03/02/behavioural-scientists-were-the-lay-preachers-of-late-neoliberalism/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">extent of malpractice within behavioural science</a>, particularly in business schools. There’s an incredibly <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/business-school-fraud-research/680669/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">cutting article</a> in the recent Atlantic going deeply into a crisis which is still very much in motion: </p><blockquote><p>Business-school psychologists are scholars, but they aren’t shooting for a Nobel Prize. Their research doesn’t typically aim to solve a social problem; it won’t be curing anyone’s disease. It doesn’t even seem to have much influence on business practices, and it certainly hasn’t shaped the nation’s commerce. Still, its flashy findings come with clear rewards: consulting gigs and speakers’ fees, not to mention lavish academic incomes. Starting salaries at business schools can be $240,000 a year—double what they are at campus psychology departments, academics told me.</p><p>The research scandal that has engulfed this field goes far beyond the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/psychology-studies-replicate/468537/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">replication crisis</a> that has plagued psychology and other disciplines in recent years. Long-standing flaws in how scientific work is done—including insufficient sample sizes and the sloppy application of statistics—have left large segments of the research literature <a href="https://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/08/can_smiling_make_you_happier_maybe_maybe_not_we_have_no_idea.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">in doubt</a>. Many avenues of study once deemed promising turned out to be <a href="https://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/03/ego_depletion_an_influential_theory_in_psychology_may_have_just_been_debunked.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">dead ends</a>. But it’s one thing to understand that scientists have been <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2016/03/the-psychology-replication-crisis-could-be-due-to-sketchy-practices-in-the-lab.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">cutting corners</a>. It’s quite another to suspect that they’ve been creating their results from scratch.</p><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/business-school-fraud-research/680669/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/business-school-fraud-research/680669/</a></p></blockquote><p>What happens when you introduce generative AI into this toxic situation? It provides potent new tools for research misconduct but also potent need tools for <a href="https://markcarrigan.net/2023/10/08/the-coming-wave-of-document-forensics-about-to-hit-the-university-the-weak-signals-of-generative-ai/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">document forensics</a>. We’re in for an interesting few years 🍿</p><p></p><p><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/behavioural-science/" target="_blank">#behaviouralScience</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/fraud/" target="_blank">#fraud</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/knowledge-system/" target="_blank">#knowledgeSystem</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/malpractice/" target="_blank">#malpractice</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/psychology/" target="_blank">#psychology</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/publishing/" target="_blank">#publishing</a></p>