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☆ Duke's 3-year fraud investigation into Dan Ariely has ended, and the star professor still has a job. Does he want it?
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-22 | by ( Kate Taylor | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +17 min

For years, the Duke professor Dan Ariely was at the top of his game. Three professors behind the blog Data Colada reported evidence of fake data in a 2012 paper Ariely coauthored on honesty pledges. "When people do take a risk and they succeed, everybody enjoys it," Ariely told BI. In 2010, Ariely told NPR that two dentists examining the same teeth for cavities would agree only 50% of the time, citing research from Delta Dental. While the board originally said it would "unanimously stand in support of President Gay," Gay stepped down in early January in response to the backlash.

Persons: Dan Ariely, Dan Ariely's, Jesse L, Martin, Ariely, Duke, sniffed, they'd, James B, —, they're, Francesca Gino, Ariely's, Marc Tessier Lavigne, Claudine Gay, Prince Andrew ., he's, Brad Swain, He's, Gordon Pennycook, Sean Gallup, Nick Brown, who's, Michael Sanders, who'd, Sanders, Gino, Aimee Drolet Rossi, Rossi, she'd, Amir, wasn't, hasn't, I've, haven't, isn't, would've, Claudine Gay's, Andrew Lichtenstein, Bill Ackman, Gay, Harvard, doesn't, Gay should've, Brown, Cornell Watson, who've, wouldn't Organizations: Google, NBC, UCLA, Duke, Business, Harvard Business, TED, Irrational, Cornell, Getty, Burda, King's College London, New York Times, NPR, Delta Dental, Higher Education, Hartford, Ariely, Harvard, University, Universities, BI, Colorado's, King's College Locations: Buckingham Palace, British, Hartford, Gaza, Montana

But the Israel-Hamas war has underscored how the platform now transformed into X has become not only unreliable but is actively promoting falsehoods. “People are desperate for information and social media context may actively interfere with people’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction,” said Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor of psychology at Cornell University who studies misinformation. But unlike X, TikTok has never been known as the No. Meanwhile, in Europe, major social media platforms are facing stricter scrutiny over the war. “Our policy is that everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports,” Musk wrote on X.

Persons: Ian Bremmer, “, algorithmically, ”, Gordon Pennycook, TikTok, Kolina Koltai, Koltai, we’ve, Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, Pennycook, Michelle Donelan, Thierry Breton, Musk, ” Musk, ” Breton, ___ Kelvin Chan Organizations: Twitter, Elon, YouTube, Facebook, Cornell University, Media, Press, Israel, Reuters, Britain’s, Google, Digital Services, EU Locations: Israel, Europe, London

☆ Harvard professor Francesca Gino was accused of faking data. Now her million-dollar empire is crumbling — and scholars are eyeing who's next.
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-01 | by ( Kate Taylor | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +22 min

"We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data," the Data Colada professors wrote. Data Colada found that the raw data showed clear anomalies, such as a distribution infinitely more likely to be produced by a random-number generator than actual people. Soon after, Data Colada ran an article alleging that Gino tampered with data in at least one of her honesty-pledge experiments. A post on Data Colada or a tweet from Brown is like a bomb going off in the behavioral-science world. Others who attempted to build on Gino's studies are grappling with having wasted time, money, and energy.

Persons: It's, Francesca Gino, Gino, Michael Sanders, Greg Burd, —, Hugo Boss, Gino coauthoring, Swarthmore College's Bhanot, Maurice Schweitzer, Simine Vazire, Sanders, Goldman Sachs, Schweitzer, they'd, Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson —, Data Colada, Dan Ariely, Ariely, Chris Goodney, Harvard, Colada, Nick Brown, Brown, Jeff Lees, Lees, There's Ariely, Brian Wansink's, HBS's Amy Cuddy's, Cuddy, Amy Cuddy's, Marie Claire's, Allison Williams, Astrid Stawiarz, Marie Claire Simonsohn, Simmons, Nelson, they're, Gordon Pennycook, Pennycook, it's, Bhanot Organizations: TED, Twitter, LinkedIn, Harvard, Wharton, Swarthmore College, Harvard Business School, Alaska Airlines, King's College London, Tione, University of Trento, Sant'anna, Studies, Carnegie Mellon University, University of North, Wired, Forbes, Google, Swarthmore, University of Melbourne, Disney, Lavin Agency, Data, Duke University, who's, NBC, BuzzFeed News, Bloomberg, Getty, Privately, Higher Education, Hill, Duke, US Department of, Cornell University, New York Times Locations: Trento, Pisa, University of North Carolina, HBS, Guatemala, Boston, New York, British, Guatemalan

☆ Why do people buy crackpot conspiracy theories?
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-26 | by ( Adam Rogers | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +13 min

When it comes to the spread of cockamamie conspiracy theories, Twitter was a maximum viable product long before Elon Musk paid $44 billion for the keys. The more you think you're right all the time, a new study suggests, the more likely you are to buy conspiracy theories, regardless of the evidence. It'd be better, or at least more reassuring, if conspiracy theories were fueled by dumb yahoos rather than self-centered monsters. Still, most scientists thought conspiracy theories weren't worth their time, the province of weirdos connecting JFK's death to lizard aliens. Pennycook's findings also suggest an explanation for why conspiracy theories have become so widely accepted.

☆ Sure, Twitter and Facebook have deepened polarization — just not in the way you think
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-27 | by ( Adam Rogers | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

The conventional wisdom blames social media for the widening divide because the timing lines up. Maybe the problem isn't that social media has driven us all into like-minded bubbles. Maybe it's that social media has obliterated the bubbles we've all lived in for centuries. On top of that, Törnberg adds, there's the way people react to all the new ideas that social media exposes them to. And as one leading social media and polarization researcher told me, the model is not empirical, which makes it hard to test.

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