Below I describe the process through which I have evaluated the paper. Before doing so, I wish to emphasize that I remain agnostic to the truth of allegations against Francesca Gino, and have not seen sufficient public evidence of intentional manipulation or data fraud to warrant suspicion in any other paper on which Francesca Gino is a coauthor. I am hopeful that as more information is revealed from the secret HBS investigation, more definitive conclusions can be reached. Nevertheless, I am evaluating my papers carefully now for transparency reasons, to best of my abilities and available data.

This paper includes three similar studies measuring how the presence of substantial cash wealth changes how people make decisions around cheating.  All three studies were conducted by Francesca Gino using pencil and paper data gathering and separately analyzed by both authors from an excel file created by RAs (to the best of my memory). I have the original excel files for studies 2 and 3. I assume I do not have the data from study 1 because it disappeared with my old CMU email account. We do not have the paper and pencil sheets, which were not kept past several years per standard practice and I believe IRB protocol requirements. Thus, I infer nothing from the non-existence of those original physical data.

The studies used a very strong manipulation. While prior studies had used images of money, fake money, or other priming mechanisms to study how money salience influenced decisions, we used $7,000 in visible real cash to pay participants from.  The weak manipulations in prior papers have not replicated, which we anticipated when using real stacks of cash. This cash was impossible to ignore by participants, and relevant because they were paid from it. I continue to believe this was a strong manipulation that could plausibly produce a substantial effect with strong financial incentives. This may be a question for replication, however.

I plan to create a replication and forensics file for these two studies, similar to those for my Psych Science and Org Science papers (which took weeks apiece). I also will attempt to track down old emails and the remaining file through my old computers. This is time intensive however, and will happen when I have bandwidth. At that point, I will be happy to share that package and data with researchers committed to a fair and careful evaluation of the data.

As always, I welcome researchers who wish to replicate any study in fair and thoughtful way.  In the case of this study, the manipulation was the presence of cash. Cash has less salience for later generations than those participating in these studies (early millenials), so I would naturally imagine a smaller effect, assuming the effect truly exists. I am happy to coordinate with or participate in any replication of the study.