Category: Retractions & errors
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He Said, She Said: Research Edition w/Special Guest Ping Dong
Ping Dong has just had her doctoral degree revoked by University of Toronto due to research misconduct that occurred in her dissertation which was published in three separate papers (2 now retracted). She was a marketing professor at Northwestern until she left her job and disappeared following a few retractions. According to a summary of…
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Everyone involved in Dan Ariely’s fake data scandal now has an alibi—except for Ariely himself
In the fall of 2021, Dan Ariely, the most famous marketing professor in the world, was caught with fake data. A prominent study about how to make people more honest by signing at the top of the document included data from an insurance company that was obviously tampered with. This is a paper that was…
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UCLA Professor Refuses to Cover for Dan Ariely in Issue of Data Provenance
In one of the more bizarre twists of the Dan Ariely saga, there is a huge issue of provenance in one of Dan Ariely’s studies. The study in question is Dan Ariely’s Ten Commandments study at JMR. The hugely impactful paper has over 3,000 citations but unfortunately failed to replicate in a large-scale systematic replication…
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Scientific journal with 3.4% replication rate refuses to retract deeply anomalous papers by associate editor
The Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) is widely considered to be the most prestigious journal in consumer behavior, a sub-field of marketing. Despite perceptions of prestige, JCR is plagued with problems. In addition to the high degree of bias that can be seen in forensic meta-analyses of its papers, JCR’s replication rate is an abysmal…
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Following a failure to replicate, “Super Size Me” paper turns out to be full of numerical inconsistencies
When Tunca, Ziano and Xu (2022) set out to replicate Dubois et al. (2012), they had no idea that their efforts would lead to the original authors requesting retraction of the original study. The original study claimed that consumers view larger food options to be a status signal. For example, consider the picture above. Look…
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2022 marketing metascience year in review
First, definitely check out the 2021 marketing metascience year in review if you haven’t yet. This is an update of that review. Let’s get into it! Just like 2021, 2022 has brought a deluge of new replications and bias studies, which is great because there had been very little effort to test the trustworthiness of…
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Three strikes for marketing professor, Nicolas Guéguen (but he doesn’t appear to be out)
Nicolas Guéguen, a marketing professor at Université Bretagne Sud, now holds the title for most retractions of any currently working marketing professor with three. In honor of this occasion, I’ve created this catalog of all the articles about marketing’s most notorious professor who is still employed in the field. In addition to three retractions, Guéguen…
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Dan Ariely claims authorship order shields him from blame; speculates that a low-level envelope stuffer committed the fraud
If you haven’t heard, world-famous marketing professor, Dan Ariely, was caught with fake data in fall of 2021. I’m not saying that he faked the data but he hasn’t done anything yet (show evidence, explain what happened, etc.) that would make anybody think it was someone else. Well in June of 2022, he finally did…
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A follow up post about the recent JMR retraction
I found it interesting that the investigative team did a last digit analysis because I did not include any last digit analysis in my complaint. The idea of the last digit analysis is that a set of last digits from a group of related numbers should in most cases be randomly uniformly distributed from 0…
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Another Jayati Sinha paper with impossible means
My opinion: The effects don’t pass the smell test Sinha and Wang (2013) claim there is a type of loneliness x time horizon crossover interaction effect on impulsive behavior. Any time you see a bunch of massive crossover effects it’s interesting. This is really the holy grail of marketing. The best way to get this kind…
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AMA actively discourages authors from sharing their data with 3rd parties
If you don’t know, American Marketing Association (AMA) is the biggest association in marketing. They have four major journals, including two of our top four (Journal of Marketing and Journal of Marketing Research). A unique thing about AMA is that they have never retracted a paper at any of their journals. This is surprising given…
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The mystery of the “Red Potato Chip Study” Part 1
Picture is the author attempting to replicate the red chip protocol with his children acting as lab assistants. Prior to Brian Wansink being relieved of his duties due to scientific misconduct and his subsequent resignation, he ran the “Red Potato Chip Study” (Geier, Wansink & Rozin, 2012). The study claimed that people would eat fewer…