Inside an Academic Scandal: A Story of Fraud and Betrayal

How fraud in a published paper about honesty roiled the world of social science.

In 2012 Max Bazerman, along with four coauthors, published an influential paper showing that “signing first”—that is, promising to tell the truth before filling out a form—produced greater honesty than signing afterward. In 2021, academic sleuths revealed that two of the experiments in the paper were fraudulent, triggering what would become one of the most significant academic frauds of the twenty-first century.

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