This 2013 Marketing Letters paper was retracted in 2016.
This article has been retracted at the suggestion of journal Editors-in-Chief, Peter N. Golder and Joel H. Steckel. The article’s authors unanimously requested retraction of Study 3 based on unexplained anomalies in the data and coding errors. As a result, the editors deem it appropriate to retract the entire article. [retraction notice]
Much of the back and forth of the investigation is public. Here is my crude summary of events:
Pashler et al. 2016 [link]:
- They were “struck by large effect sizes in the first two studies” so they requested the raw data.
- There were numerous unexplainable patterns in the data, some of which seemed designed to help prove the study hypotheses. For example, see figure 1 (below) and note the (5,0) and (0,5) data that is completely out of the expected pattern.
All three authors respond:
- Summary of Rose: Rose never touched the data. His contribution was conceptual and he contributed greatly to the writing. Sinha collected the data but it was manipulated and coded by Chatterjee. Based on Pashler et al. 2016 and additional anomalies identified by Sinha, Rose requested partial retraction (study 3 only) of the paper. [link to Rose’s commentary]
- Sinha [link] and Chatterjee [link] both responded also. They were much more defensive but I did not personally find their arguments to be valid or compelling. Andrew Gelman called them “horrible, Richard Tol-like defenses of their work” [link]
Rose left comments on a blog post by Andrew Gelman that seemed to imply that Chatterjee is solely responsible for the data anomalies. [Gelman’s blog post]
The entire paper was ultimately retracted in 2016.
Oh, and by the way, the data is publicly posted if you want to reanalyze it: [Chatterjee et al 2013 data]
Aaron Charlton, PhD, MBA is a marketing professional who currently works in industry for Away Clinic and Metascience & Marketing Lab and lives in Mesa, Arizona, USA. He is formerly an academic and still takes interest in improving the quality of research in the field of marketing.
Leave a Reply