The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/business-school-fraud-research/680669/

created by Maxwellsdemon17 on 27/11/2024 at 19:39 UTC

433 upvotes, 5 top-level comments (showing 5)

Comments

Comment by AutoModerator at 27/11/2024 at 19:39 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

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Comment by Maxwellsdemon17 at 27/11/2024 at 19:40 UTC

187 upvotes, 4 direct replies

"It’s easy to imagine how cheating might lead to more cheating. If business-school psychology is beset with suspect research, then the bar for getting published in its flagship journals ratchets up: A study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out. Such incentives move in only one direction: Eventu­ally, the standard tools for torturing your data will no longer be enough. Now you have to go a little further; now you have to cut your data up, and carve them into sham results. Having one or two prolific frauds around would push the bar for publishing still higher, inviting yet more corruption. (And because the work is not exactly brain surgery, no one dies as a result.) In this way, a single discipline might come to look like Major League Baseball did 20 years ago: defined by juiced-up stats."

Comment by psych0fish at 27/11/2024 at 21:24 UTC*

102 upvotes, 6 direct replies

While my thought is not a new idea, I continue to contemplate how big a lie the meritocracy is. Like across all fields, sports, business, politics, it’s so corrupt and littered with cheaters. What’s worse is these people pretend like it’s their god given birth right and they worked hard for it and earned it.

It’s such an alluring proposition though, work hard and succeed. So I get why it’s so easy to get swept up in it. It took me quite a few years of deprogramming and deconstruction to get here and there is still much work to do.

Edit to add: I think of this much like a gambler. You can tell them the odds and they can know the odds but still think they have luck and can beat the house.

Comment by Unga_Bunga at 28/11/2024 at 01:39 UTC

12 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Ungated version: https://archive.ph/zfImE

Comment by CoffeeElectronic9782 at 29/11/2024 at 12:22 UTC

-1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Isn’t this a greater indictment of the joke that evolutionary psychology as a field is than B-schools?!