Francesca Gino

In August 2023, Gino filed a 25 million dollar lawsuit against Harvard, Dean Srikant Datar and the three Data Colada authors. She accuses them of conspiring to defame her, destroying her reputation and applying a discriminatory and contractually improper research misconduct procedure.

State of the evidence

Documented

Attribution

Protagonist is the complainant

In 2025, Harvard filed its own defamation action or counterclaim, alleging that Gino had created an altered Excel file and then backdated it to support her public claim that the university had analysed the wrong dataset. Forensic evidence filed with the court and made public in 2026 describes the replacement of a file on her computer in September 2023 and is used by Harvard to support the theory of attempted concealment.

State of the evidence

Alleged

Attribution

Accused

In May 2025, Harvard revoked Francesca Gino's tenure and terminated her employment, an exceptionally rare sanction. The decision followed the internal research misconduct proceedings and a separate procedure to review her tenure.

State of the evidence

Documented

Attribution

Directly implicated

In September 2024, a federal judge dismissed Gino's defamation claims against Harvard and the claims targeting the Data Colada authors. A significant part of the case nevertheless survived, notably claims that Harvard had breached its contractual or disciplinary obligations; Gino subsequently added or strengthened discrimination allegations.

Attribution

Protagonist is the complainant

The 2012 PNAS paper claiming that signing an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form reduced false statements was retracted in 2021 after analyses showed that field data supplied by Dan Ariely had been manipulated. In 2023, Data Colada and documents from Harvard's investigation also identified separate anomalies in study 1, collected and analysed under Francesca Gino's responsibility.

State of the evidence

Documented

Attribution

Directly implicated

The 2014 paper 'Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity' was retracted in 2023 after Harvard's investigation and an independent forensic firm found differences between the earliest known versions of the data and the published files. Once anomalies were removed, several relationships became weaker and a key result was no longer statistically significant.

State of the evidence

Documented

Attribution

Directly implicated

The 2015 paper on authenticity and feelings of moral impurity was retracted in 2023 following a Harvard investigation. The retraction notice states that when the available laboratory and online data were recombined and reanalysed, the principal finding of experiment 4 was no longer statistically significant.

State of the evidence

Documented

Attribution

Directly implicated

The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology retracted the paper 'Why Connect?' in 2023 at the request of Harvard Business School's research integrity officer. The review identified unexplained discrepancies between study 3a data available on the Open Science Framework and the raw Qualtrics data, discrepancies that shifted the results towards the published hypothesis.

State of the evidence

Documented

Attribution

Directly implicated

Following Data Colada's reporting of four studies in 2021, Harvard Business School conducted a lengthy internal investigation with assistance from external forensic experts. The institution concluded that acts of research misconduct had occurred in the work examined, requested retractions and placed Francesca Gino on unpaid administrative leave.

State of the evidence

Documented

Attribution

Institutional responsibility