Trust…
The New Yorker recently ran an article on Oliver Sacks, who fabricated key details in his celebrated case studies. His books are incredibly powerful. He wrote with empathy and respect. But he privately called his own findings “lies” and “falsification” in his own journals.
Connect this to Diederik Stapel (50+ faked psychology papers), Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino (honesty researchers accused of data fraud), and a replication crisis showing only 1/3 of psychology studies hold up.
The common thread isn’t complicated: people basically lied.
Sacks knew he was giving patients “powers which they do not have.” Harvard found Gino “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly committed research misconduct.” Stapel invented data for twelve years. Ariely denies responsibility for “directly” altering data.
These are moral failures. Full stop.
But there’s a second question: why did the lies work for so long?
The human sciences developed a seductive hybrid: research that was rigorous-seeming AND beautifully told. Sacks became “the scientist who wrote like a dream.” Behavioral scientists built empires and made huge amounts of money on TED Talk-ready findings.
The elegant prose, the compelling narratives, the camera-ready research….these weren’t neutral vehicles for fraud. They were what made it work. They created immunity. Who questions a story that beautiful? Who replicates research that already feels true?
Systems that should have caught liars instead rewarded them. Journals wanted novel findings, not boring replications. Universities wanted stars, not skeptics.
So we have two failures:
Moral: Individuals chose to deceive.
Structural: Institutions let deception flourish because good stories were more valued than verified ones.
Both matter. Blaming only structure lets liars off the hook. Blaming only individuals misses why this kept happening across fields and decades.
