Commentary: Why Harvard Business School Keeps Producing Research Scandals

Harvard’s lawyers recently subpoenaed me to be deposed in a lawsuit arising from one of Harvard Business School’s most prominent research scandals: allegations of misconduct against former professor Francesca Gino and her contention that Harvard mishandled its investigation. I am no expert on Gino’s research or the litigation, so the arrival of a constable with a subpoena came as quite a shock. I am better known for my analyses of the work of another HBS professor, George Serafeim, so when I posted about the subpoena on LinkedIn, a heated debate broke out comparing the two cases and the relative seriousness of different forms of research misconduct. Is falsifying data worse than misreporting statistical results? Is publishing inaccurate findings worse than failing to correct them?

As the discussion progressed, however, I concluded the debate was fundamentally misdirected. A more important question was being ignored: Why do research scandals keep emerging from the Harvard Business School?

A PATTERN, NOT AN OUTLIER

First, some background. Many readers will know the story of Francesca Gino, the scholar of honesty who was accused of dishonesty. Behavioral scientists writing on the research-integrity blog Data Colada identified markers of possible data fabrication in four of her coauthored studies. After a lengthy investigation, Harvard revoked her tenure and terminated her appointment. She denies committing research misconduct and is suing the university over its handling of the investigation. That is the case that led to my subpoena.

Fewer readers will know of my critiques of George Serafeim’s research, though his publications and their influence are widely known. One of his regular coauthors has even asserted that their work “caused ESG investing to take off” – a claim with multi-trillion-dollar implications. Yet over the past several years, I and other scholars have found four of Serafeim’s papers to contain conceptual flaws, misreports, and findings that fail to replicate (see here, here, here, and here). Serafeim and his coauthors subsequently acknowledged misreporting an empirical method and a critical finding in one of their papers, attributing both to poor editing, but they have declined to correct the former. I filed research-integrity complaints concerning these issues, and Harvard responded with its standard statement: “whether or how the School does or does not move forward in acting upon it will not be communicated to you.”

The online debate parsed the differences between the cases, but it overlooked the fact that these are only the most recent examples from HBS. In 2014, historian Jill Lepore published a scathing critique of the evidence supporting Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. Though she did not accuse him of fraud, she argued that he had substantially overstated the evidentiary support for his theory. “Historical analysis proceeds from certain conditions regarding proof,” Lepore wrote. “None of these conditions have been met.” Her critique drew public attention to longstanding criticism that Christensen had selectively interpreted historical evidence and overstated the empirical support for his theory.

In 2015, another high-profile controversy erupted when researchers writing on the research-integrity blog Data Colada argued that Amy Cuddy had transformed a small, preliminary experiment into a sweeping self-help message. Their central criticism was not fraud, but that the evidence was too limited and too uncertain to justify the confidence with which “power posing” was marketed to millions of people. Cuddy quietly left HBS in 2017.

Then came the Gino and Serafeim cases.

A BUSINESS MODEL BUILT FOR SCANDAL

Could Harvard Business School be unusually vulnerable to research scandals?

I believe its business model may provide part of the answer. Unlike most universities, which try to maintain some separation between scholarship and advocacy, HBS deliberately combines them. The ideal HBS professor does more than publish academic research. They advise CEOs and presidents, sit on corporate boards, found consulting firms, and write bestselling books. In other words, they become “thought leaders.”

The school’s conflict-of-interest policy explicitly acknowledges the risks of this model. It notes that outside activities “create opportunities for personal gain, financial or otherwise,” and that these secondary interests “may conflict with the faculty member’s primary … obligations to the School and its mission.” Yet the recent wave of research controversies at HBS suggests a more fundamental problem – one that no conflict-of-interest policy can address.

Thought leadership and credible science operate according to fundamentally different logics. To lead thought, ideas must arrive first. That means promoting them before they have been thoroughly tested, while they are still, in many respects, just educated guesses. By contrast, science often requires years or decades to determine whether those guesses are true and valuable.

FROM WORKING PAPER TO WORLD STAGE

Consider the case of Amy Cuddy.  She was an assistant professor at HBS when New York Times columnist David Brooks visited campus and became enthusiastic about her ideas. He published a column describing her research on “expansive poses” and feelings of power. A year later, she was on the TED stage claiming that this simple “life hack” could “significantly change the way your life unfolds.” She cited related research on body language to motivate the idea, but the principal experimental evidence that two minutes of “power posing” could produce such effects came from a study involving just 42 participants – 21 assigned to expansive poses and 21 controls.

If Cuddy’s rise to prominence was rapid, George Serafeim’s was meteoric. In his second year as a professor, he posted a working paper on the HBS website. Just six weeks later, it became the principal academic evidence cited in Al Gore and David Blood’s Manifesto on Sustainable Capitalism in the Wall Street Journal. They argued that it showed “investors who identify companies that embed sustainability into their strategies can earn substantial returns while experiencing low volatility.” The manifesto helped launch the ESG boom, and Serafeim quickly became one of its most influential thought leaders. Yet the paper itself would not be published for more than two years, and its central findings would not be rigorously re-examined for another decade.

The speed of these transformations weakens the credibility of science, and the problem is compounded by selection. The ideas most likely to be promoted, and become prominent, are those that appear novel, surprising, and exciting. Yet, as economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang have observed, such ideas are less likely to be true. Indeed, it is precisely because they conflict with everyday experiences that they seem so compelling. We know that courage and confidence usually require discipline and effort, so it is thrilling to believe that simply adopting an expansive posture  – “power posing” – can transform our presence and performance. We know that consistently beating the market is extraordinarily difficult, so we are eager to believe that we can vastly outperform it simply by analyzing publicly available sustainability data.

The HBS brand adds to our vulnerability by suppressing healthy skepticism. Claims that might otherwise be dismissed as idle speculation are treated as breakthroughs when they emerge from Harvard. This allows provisional findings to be transformed into products that can be marketed immediately to executives, investors, policymakers, and the media.

HBS’s resulting “first-mover advantage” has enormous value: student applications and executive education revenues for the school; consulting engagements, speaking fees, board seats, royalties, and equity positions for faculty. Those rewards arrive immediately, long before science has time to determine whether the underlying ideas are actually true.

A TEMPTATION I KNOW FIRSTHAND

Who is to blame when celebrated ideas later prove exaggerated, unsupported, or even fabricated? It is comforting to point at the scholars who produced them, because nothing else is required of us. It is easy to condemn someone as a bad apple and imagine the problem has been solved. But that overlooks the institution that rewarded, promoted, and celebrated those ideas long before anyone had tested whether they were true. It also overlooks an uncomfortable reality: when institutions reward speed, certainty, and influence over validation, many scholars will be tempted to tell stories that are cleaner, bolder, or more certain than the evidence warrants.

I know this temptation firsthand. During my two years at Harvard Business School as a Bower Fellow, I became captivated by an idea that I believed could change how companies innovate. I had data that seemed promising, and I jumped ahead to imagining the book, the keynote speeches, the influence. To support the most exciting story, I found myself running statistical model after statistical model, looking for results that fit it.

Then a doctoral student pointed out that what he was learning in econometrics contradicted how we were conducting our analysis. His comment stopped me – not immediately, but my searches slowed, and eventually I abandoned the project. Looking back, I realize how easily I had allowed the search for a compelling narrative to replace the search for truth.

A SYSTEM FAILURE

A decade and a half later, Harvard’s lawyers caused me to revisit that experience from a different perspective. I found myself comparing the allegations against Francesca Gino with those I had made against George Serafeim.  Which was more serious? Which had the greater impact? Those are interesting questions, but they are not the ones that matter most. A deeper question is this: Why does a university that claims to be devoted to the pursuit of truth reward and promote influential ideas long before science has determined whether they are actually true?

Institutions shape behavior. Those with strong cultures, like HBS, do so most of all. If an institution rewards novelty more than careful testing, that is what it will get. If it dangles great riches before those who are first to offer solutions – no matter how difficult the problem – it will repeatedly promote ideas that are, in H. L. Mencken’s words, “neat, plausible, and wrong.” Seen from this perspective, it is not surprising that the school has experienced repeated scandals. What is remarkable is that we continue to focus our criticism on the scholars accused of misconduct, parsing their relative culpability instead of confronting the institutional incentives that make such scandals predictable – rewarding certainty before validation, influence before evidence, and “thought leadership” before science.

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Andrew A. King is the Allen and Kelli Questrom Chair in Strategy and Innovation at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

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