Inside an Academic Scandal

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.

In Inside an Academic Scandal, Bazerman tells the sobering story of how fraud in a published paper about inducing honesty upended countless academic careers, caused havoc in organizations that had implemented the idea of “signing first,” and undermined faith in academic research and publication.

This vivid account offers an inside look at the replicability crisis in social science today. In intriguing detail, the book explores recent conflicts and transformations underway in the field, considers the role of relationships and trust in enabling fraud in academic research, and describes Bazerman’s own part in the scandal—what he did and didn’t do to stop the fraud in the signing-first paper, what consequences he faced, and what hard lessons he learned in the process.

A compelling story of fraud and betrayal, the book provides a deep and ultimately instructive look at how academic research works—and doesn’t—in social science.