I wrote earlier in the year about the extent of malpractice within behavioural science, particularly in business schools. There’s an incredibly cutting article in the recent Atlantic going deeply into a crisis which is still very much in motion:
Business-school psychologists are scholars, but they aren’t shooting for a Nobel Prize. Their research doesn’t typically aim to solve a social problem; it won’t be curing anyone’s disease. It doesn’t even seem to have much influence on business practices, and it certainly hasn’t shaped the nation’s commerce. Still, its flashy findings come with clear rewards: consulting gigs and speakers’ fees, not to mention lavish academic incomes. Starting salaries at business schools can be $240,000 a year—double what they are at campus psychology departments, academics told me.
The research scandal that has engulfed this field goes far beyond the replication crisis that has plagued psychology and other disciplines in recent years. Long-standing flaws in how scientific work is done—including insufficient sample sizes and the sloppy application of statistics—have left large segments of the research literature in doubt. Many avenues of study once deemed promising turned out to be dead ends. But it’s one thing to understand that scientists have been cutting corners. It’s quite another to suspect that they’ve been creating their results from scratch.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/business-school-fraud-research/680669/
What happens when you introduce generative AI into this toxic situation? It provides potent new tools for research misconduct but also potent need tools for document forensics. We’re in for an interesting few years 🍿
Mark Carrigan 