New Yorker Rebuttal
Disclosure: Reading the misleading and inaccurate reporting by the New Yorker this weekend was awful. I debated if it made sense to speak out, and after much thinking I decided to stand up for what I know is true. As exhausted as I am, I just could not stay quiet on all the things they got wrong.
Post Date: October 2, 2023
Preface: Background and Context
In mid-May of this year, I learned the New Yorker was talking to many of my colleagues about an upcoming article. This was before HBS completed its investigation and before Data Colada published its blog posts.
It is interesting who the New Yorker decided to quote, and who they decided NOT to quote.
Multiple colleagues interviewed by the New Yorker have shared with me their sense that its reporter was determined to write a negative article that cast the Data Colada bloggers as the heroes of the story. They shared with me how they tried to defend me in their interviews, but the reporter seemed uninterested in that. They also described how they shared positive things about my work processes and productivity, but, as it turned out, the reporter used very few of these positive interviews.
As an example, a colleague shared the following after an interview:
“It became clear to me from the start of the interview that he *really* likes and respects and believes the DC guys. I would go as far as saying he is a DC fan. And it wouldn’t surprise me if they aren’t somehow painted as superheroes in his story. Although he gave me no explicit indication that he was writing about them, he was so fluent in their defense and so proactive in their righteousness that it made me wonder. If I raised even the smallest question about DC he went into full-throated defense.”
Although the New Yorker reporter insinuates there is something suspicious about how I handled data on a routine basis, readers should know that the HBS investigation found nothing of the sort.
The New Yorker reporter insinuates that there have always been suspicions about how I have handled data on a routine basis. This was shocking to read.
Readers should know that the HBS investigation found nothing of the sort. During the investigation, HBS interviewed collaborators and research assistants and produced over 150 pages of transcripts from the interviews. To quote from the HBS report,
[collaborator] “Francesca and I have done so many studies, a lot of them as part of the CLER lab, the behavioral lab at Harvard. And I'd say 80% of them never worked out.”
[RA] “Every time we got results that weren't significant, it was never an angry response.”
[collaborator] “I've never had any suspicion whatsoever that any study that I've been involved with her would have any lack of integrity. I've always found Francesca to be of the highest integrity in my interactions with her.”
[collaborator] “We've certainly had studies that didn't work, and I remember having conversations about them with her. And I just remember us retooling and thinking about, what's a better manipulation?”
What’s frustrating is that none of these sentiments are reflected in the article.
The reality is, the HBS Report admitted in its summary that all of the people it interviewed concluded my lab environment and culture were pristine:
“We acknowledge, and we took seriously in our decision-making, statements by all witnesses that they never doubted the integrity of the data in the study or studies in question. One witness who knew Professor Gino well said they never doubted her integrity in any way. In addition, several exhibits appended by Professor Gino to her Response (Exhibit 29) contained messages to her from co-authors, colleagues, and former doctoral students expressing their admiration for her research rigor and integrity.
The witnesses we interviewed also said that they had no evidence that Professor Gino had ever pressured colleagues, doctoral students, post-docs, or research associates, including themselves, to produce particular results in a study, or that Professor Gino had created a negative atmosphere in her lab. Moreover, some witnesses spontaneously said that they had worked on multiple studies with Professor Gino that were never published because the studies didn’t work out.”
Readers should also note how The New Yorker reporter repeatedly insinuates there is something suspicious about my overall productivity.
In multiple instances, the reporter refers to my productivity as something that’s suspicious or that I need to be ashamed of.
As anyone who knows me well can testify, I have been productive across all dimensions of my professional life – academic articles, HBR articles, HBS case studies, the number of MBA students and executive education participants I’ve taught, academic advising, committee work, editorial positions with journals, as well as informal mentoring and collaboration – there is nothing suspicious about this. Yes, I am guilty of working hard, but that is not a crime. It is simply my work ethic. And I am passionate about the work I do.
I realize that journalism is an act of selection; the journalist must choose what to include and what not to include in their story. But readers should be aware that, in my case, the New Yorker reporter was not only selective, he was downright sloppy in his reporting.
I spent almost two hours on the phone with the reporter and a fact-checker from The New Yorker earlier this week. The fact checker had shared 58 “facts” to fact-check. I described how 52 of them were either incorrect or misleading. Even basic facts (e.g., what my degree was in and which years I spent at each university) were incorrect.
The following are four examples of the 58 facts checked:
Fact #1: At the end of your postdoc, Harvard Business School declined to extend you an offer for a professorship.
INACCURATE. HBS did not indicate they would hire me after the postdoc when they offered me the postdoc. It is not common to be hired after a post doc.
Fact #2: At this time, you entered a 4-year period of professional difficulty.
COMPLETELY INACCURATE. This is someone’s opinion about what they alleged I was emotionally going through, but it is false and speculative. The two years at CMU (a prestigious university) were years of great personal development: I had wonderful mentors and I learned a lot. I started a job as an assistant professor at UNC (another renown university) in 2008 and had other offers. There was nothing difficult professionally about that.Fact #3: You’ve done a number of speaking gigs in which you’ve charged up to $100,000.
INACCURATE. The only speaking engagement for which I have ever negotiated an amount like this was a full-day workshop in Australia that was canceled in light of this situation.Fact #4: Once at CMU, you began to publish frequently. It seemed as though you were able to get results out of any study.
INACCURATE. I had various papers in the pipeline by the time I arrived. Papers take a significant amount of time to research and publish, and had long been in the works. I had many studies that did not work that I walked away from freely. I gave the reporter names of co-authors who could speak to this. As far as I am aware, he didn’t follow up on this with any of them.
Line-by-Line Rebuttal
I invite you to pull out the New Yorker article and re-read it, side-by-side with my rebuttal below.
This is how I am first introduced in the New Yorker article:
“One of his frequent collaborators was Francesca Gino, a rising star in the field. Gino is in her mid-forties, with dark curly hair and a frazzled aspect. She grew up in Italy, where she pursued a doctorate in economics and management. Members of her cohort remember her dedication, industry, and commitment. She first came to Harvard Business School as a visiting fellow, and, once she completed her Ph.D., in 2004, she stayed on as a postdoc. She later said that she went to Harvard for a nine-month stint and never left. This story elides a few detours. By the end of her postdoc, in 2006, she had yet to publish an academic paper, and Harvard did not extend an offer.”
Notice that within the first paragraph the reporter is already implying I am untruthful. In fact, I have often used the phraseology “I went to Harvard for a nine-month stint and never left” in a light, humorous way, to underscore how I fell in love with the institution. There was never any intention of deceiving anyone. My CV is publicly available to everyone!
This is the first hint that the reporter is determined to use subtle rhetorical flourishes to turn even the most innocuous details into something negative about me.
First swipe at my productivity, implying it a suspicious thing:
"At last, she seemed to find her footing, and it soon looked as though she could get almost any study to produce results. She secured a job at U.N.C., where she entered a phase of elevated productivity. According to her C.V., she published seven journal papers in 2009; in 2011, an astonishing eleven.”
Over the three-year period from 2009-2011, I published 25 papers with 27 different co-authors and assistance from more than 30 RAs and lab managers. The studies for these papers were run over a period of six years. It would be impossible for me to publish at this pace on my own, but it is a totally different story with such a large team.
Contrary to The New Yorker reporting, there were a number of studies that did not ‘produce results.’ I see twelve projects I dropped altogether in 2011 alone, for instance, because the results did not seem robust or the hypotheses were not supported by data. Each of these studies has been helpful to my research because I learned what didn’t work, so as to get closer to what does work. Far from suspicious, this to me is being rigorous.
During fact-checking, I told the reporter this was plainly inaccurate. That studies routinely did not produce expected results. I gave him names of co-authors who could speak to this. As far as I am aware, he didn’t follow up on this with any of them.
Here’s a completely misleading swipe at my compensation:
“In 2020, she was the fifth-highest-paid employee at Harvard, earning about a million dollars that year—slightly less than the university’s president.”
The reporter ignored the contextual information I provided during fact-checking. The reality is this was a one-off instance of higher-than-normal pay because in 2020 I brought in a significant client to HBS and was asked to work intensively with them (above and beyond my normal workload). So yes, in 2020, I happened to generate a very high income. But that year was an aberration from my typical annual HBS compensation.
Notice how, despite the fact that I shared this information with the reporter, he still decided to include it, without context, for shock value.
Here’s another subtle critique of my productivity, using a line that manages to avoid naming anyone specifically or even mentioning how many people the New Yorker spoke to in order to support this insinuation.
“Gino drew admiring notice from those who could not believe her productivity. The business-school professor said, “She’s not just brilliant and successful and wealthy—she has been a kind, fun person to know. She was well liked even by researchers who were skeptical of her work.” But she drew less admiring notice, too—also from people who could not believe her productivity.”
The past few months are the first I have heard of these kinds of speculative allegations. I challenged this by sharing with the reporter that I constantly receive accolades from mentors, co-authors, and HBS about the quality of work I produced. Until now, I have never received expressed concerns over the quality of my work. I shared letters with the reporter to this effect.
This next excerpt is simply outrageous. For the reporter to include this without substantiation is irresponsible and reflective of his questionable journalistic standards:
“One former graduate student thought that she caught Gino plagiarizing portions of a literature review, but tried to convince herself that it was an honest error.”
To introduce a speculative allegation with absolutely no substantiation is deeply, deeply irresponsible and damaging. How does one defend against a throwaway comment like this, tossed into the story by an unnamed former graduate student? This is unfair reporting. There is zero evidence, and yet it is included in the story nonetheless. For the absence of doubt, I have never been accused of plagiarism. Further it is common practice for me to check papers with available software before submission since journals do that too.
The highlighted line below is another outright mischaracterization. It is bewildering to me that the reporter would write something so contrary to the truth:
“Later, in a study for a different paper, “Gino was, like, ‘I had an idea for an additional experiment that would tie everything together, and I already collected the data and wrote it up—here are the results.’ ” The former graduate student added, “My adviser was, like, ‘Did you design the study together? No. Did you know it was going to happen? No. Has she sent you the data? No. Something off is happening here.’ ” (Gino declined to address these allegations on the record.)”
I did not decline to address these allegations on the record. In fact, we talked about these allegations during fact checking in a conversation in which I attempted to set to the record straight. It is not unusual to have already collected data for another purpose that can be reconstituted. My instinct is that that is what happened here, but without knowing the specific paper, I can’t definitively say so.
Here is another example of the reporter insinuating that there was something suspicious about the way I handled data on a regular basis, ignoring the documented processes by which my studies were actually run at HBS:
“There had always been some bewilderment about Gino. Multiple people told me they found it abnormal that Gino so closely guarded her data at every step of the process. One former co-author said, “H.B.S. is so hierarchical, it’s like the military, and it was unheard of for the more senior person to do the bitch work and let the junior person have the lofty thoughts. But, then again, if I had done the grunt work, we would not have found significant results.””
Notice the rhetorical flourishes here. The use of “there had always” followed by “some” is designed to overstate how often something occurs.
For the absence of doubt, I did not closely guard data. Indeed, once I got to Harvard, the data was handled by a lab manager. I also had many projects with doctoral students who in turn handled the data. With only cursory inquires, the reporter could have learned this.
This next example is interesting. Take a look at the paragraph below, in which the reporter describes a complaint about me that was raised by a graduate student:
“In 2015, a graduate student lodged a complaint against Gino and one of her colleagues, alleging, primarily, that Gino and the colleague created a tense and belittling environment. The more unsettling charge, though, was that Gino had repeatedly refused to share the raw data from their experiments. Once, after the student didn’t hand over an analysis during a long weekend, Gino ran the study herself and produced much stronger results. On multiple occasions, the student voiced concerns to a faculty review board that Gino was playing games with data, but the board was unresponsive. A three-month investigation concluded, in a confidential report, that none of the people involved had acquitted themselves particularly well, but that no action was warranted.”
Now compare that paragraph with the one below, which is part of a note the reporter sent me during the fact-checking process. In his note to me, this is what he wrote:
“I understand that in the fall of 2015 and spring of 2016 you had to deal with a faculty review board convened to address a student complaint of bullying and abusive behavior. In my own readings of the materials considered by the investigators, it seems to me that Harvard was correct to dismiss those particular charges; it seems to me that the student's issues were largely, if not entirely, problems she created for herself. Despite the fact that the charges were ultimately dismissed, my understanding is that the process was uncomfortable, and that it prompted you to consider leaving HBS for a peer institution. In the light of the allegations you've made in your lawsuit, I'm curious about how you felt about Harvard's institutional due process in that first case. Did it seem to you equally prejudicial and unfair, or did that strike you as a process carried out in a more proper and reasonable way?”
Isn’t it interesting that none of the highlighted part made it into the article? In fact, isn’t it interesting how he took a situation in which even he recognizes (in his note to me) that the student’s complaints were unfounded… and transforms it into a carefully-worded anecdote designed to raise suspicions about me?
In fact, once HBS concluded that the complaint was unfounded, I received an apology from the then-Dean about the entire situation, and a commitment from him to improve the FRB processes. (By the way, it was the student who did not share her data.) I did everything I could to handle the situation well, including involving the General Counsel when the student was using harsh language toward a junior colleague. I alerted the Doctoral Office, and was told after the fact that the student was particularly difficult.
This next accusation is among the most serious levied by the reporter, and deserves an extended response:
“This spring, Harvard finalized a twelve-hundred-page report that found Gino culpable. As part of its investigation, Harvard obtained the original data file for one of Gino’s studies from a former research assistant. An outside firm compared that to the published data and concluded that it had been altered not only in the ways Data Colada had predicted but in other ways as well. Gino’s defense, in that case, seems to be that the published data are in fact the real data, and that the “original” data are somehow not. Data Colada titled a blog post about her alleged misdeeds “Clusterfake.””
As I made clear to the reporter, it has taken me a while to figure out what happened in this study. I invite readers to read my full rebuttal to this here and here.
Incidentally, when the reporter writes, “Gino’s defense… seems to be that the published data are in fact the real data, and that the ‘original’ data are somehow not,” his tone is dripping with skepticism. I get it. He writes this in such a throwaway style that it makes my defense sound flimsy and weak. It is not. This is why I invite you to read my full rebuttal here and here.
By the way, any attempt I made to walk the reporter through my rebuttal was met with impatience on his part. When I offered to introduce him to a colleague who could walk him, step by step, through an analysis of this paper and my rebuttal, he refused to do so. (And a quote from another person the reporter talked to about the data was used without context, thus coming across as misleading.)
In his article, the reporter also shares this anecdote from an unnamed person who admitted to tampering with data, and then confessed to me about it:
“Late one evening, years ago, she was working on a paper in her office. She had run so many studies that had worked, and she had no doubt that the effect she was investigating was real. The paper was key to her career, and she was doubled over with stress. One final study was so close to coming together, but the effect wasn’t quite there. She remembers the moment with absolute clarity. “I thought, Do I tamper with the data?” she said. “We were studying deceit. I finally said to myself, ‘O.K., you can do this bad thing, and then you can put that away in a lockbox in your mind where it never gets opened, and you will never do this again.’ And that is exactly what I did, and I am so mortified.”
The paper was a collaboration with Gino. The professor had a breakdown in Gino’s office, and recalled that Gino forgave her instantly, telling her that she was not a bad person. They pulled the paper before publication. “She may well have been doing exactly the same thing,” the professor said.”
As discussed during the fact-checking process, this is both incomplete and misleading. The person was the student of an HBS colleague, who was also an author on the paper. I asked the colleague, as the main advisor, to talk to the student at length since this was a very serious situation. I told the student that I appreciated that they came forward with the truth.
During the fact-checking process, I also disclosed that Dan Ariely was a co-author on the paper and that the student’s then-spouse was very close with the Data Colada team. It wasn’t clear to me that the reporter knew those facts from talking with the student.
In his article, the reporter also shares his psychoanalysis of me. I’m not sure what qualifies him to do that:
“Academic psychologists are generally resistant to clinical interpretations, but it’s difficult not to read a lot of Gino’s later work as the return of the repressed. There’s the title of her 2018 book, “Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life,” or her 2014 paper, now retracted, called “Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity.” The former graduate student told me, “On the one hand, she was this meek Italian woman who used to make polenta for guests—you would never have suspected her. On the other, some of the things she wrote . . . it’s like she’s trying to tell us something.”
I genuinely don’t know what to say here. The reporter is making unsubstantiated claims about academic psychologists and referencing a Sigmund Freud theory of sexual repression.
Notice the subtle dig at me in this next couple of sentences:
“Some observers have complained that Ariely, a charismatic man, has received gentler treatment than Gino. This phenomenon may also reflect the affection of his colleagues.”
The implication, of course, is that I am less ‘likeable’ and therefore less likely to be the recipient of such affection. And yet the reporter had many letters written on my behalf that expressed strong affection towards me.
Final Notes
The reporter includes this interesting paragraph in his article:
“At the end of Simmons’s unpublished post, he writes, “An influential portion of our literature is effectively a made-up story of human-like creatures who are so malleable that virtually any intervention administered at one point in time can drastically change their behavior.” He adds that a “field cannot reward truth if it does not or cannot decipher it, so it rewards other things instead. Interestingness. Novelty. Speed. Impact. Fantasy. And it effectively punishes the opposite. Intuitive Findings. Incremental Progress. Care. Curiosity. Reality.””
There is an article that claimed that baseball players whose names start with the letter K are more likely to strikeout than players whose names start with any other letter. The authors rationale for investigating this phenomenon was that these players with a starting K had been primed for failure because in baseball the letter K indicates strikeouts.
This paper would seem to be the type Simmons refers to as the sort of paper that regrettably gets rewarded. It has interestingness. Novelty. Speed. Impact. Fantasy.
Notably, it was written by Simmons and his Data Colada colleague Leif Nelson. It was also debunked in a 2010 publication in the Journal of Applied Statistics. Even though it was a debunked paper on priming, had captivated the popular press, and was written by protagonists in this article, the reporter did not mention it. To my knowledge, the author’s schools did not take punitive action based on the paper being debunked, nor did they launch an investigation into their other published work.