You might know Dan from his book Predictively Irrational, which was a huge pop science success about behavioral economics/general science. I never loved the book because his conclusions were too glib, and the studies statistically thin, but it never occurred to me that he was using falsified data. Background is below, but the latest is that the Journal of Marketing Research has “expressed concern” about one of his studies, basically saying that they tried to duplicate it and failed (in fact, found a small effect in the opposite direction), but used his data instead and duplicated it, but have concerns about that data’s provenance.
Expression of Concern: “The Dishonesty of Honest People: A Theory of Self-Concept Maintenance”, 2024
Background:
Here’s the blog post that set things into motion in 2021:
[98] Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty - Data Colada
Here’s a great summary video, though it’s 21 minutes. Some of it is entertaining in a rough way, particularly his email exchanges with Aimee Rossi.
More evidence of fraud in Dan Ariely’s work : r/slatestarcodex
My take on this is that just for that one auto study, nobody was statistically knowledgeable enough to do basic exploratory data analysis (or they would have seen that discrepancy), or even sophisticated enough to fake the data better. Basically: people doing statistics who shouldn’t.