Looking at what they found, it seems that the study authors themselves suffered from procrastination that much that they randomly created data that that fit their hypothesis about 10 minutes before the paper was due. They really phoned that in - if i actually attempt fraud, i would at least try to make the data look somewhat reasonable. Non-correlating values for liking a task and finding a task interesting, or noncorrelating performance in 3 nearly identical task is not even trying to be compelling lol

Ariely has been in a heap of scandals about this sort of thing. Becoming a celebrity addicted to attention will do that to you.

I guess the true procrastination were the friends we found allong the way.

Should have used equally spaced deadlines for their study.

It honestly blows my mind that nobody noticed such blatant anomalies until now. Apparently the "study" authors weren't the only ones looking to achieve a predetermined outcome. Bias confirmation is a helluva drug.

The original studies authors were very selective about who got their hands on that data, and

About 20 years ago, on April 20, 2006, one of the authors of the forthcoming replication, Kyle Hyndman, received the original data files in an email sent from ariely@mit.edu [1]. And about 3 years ago, on August 9, 2023, […] we received an out-of-the-blue email from Hyndman in which he sent those files to us. We performed quick analyses of the data, and then had a conversation with Hyndman and his co-author, Alberto Bisin. In that conversation, they told us they were going to conduct a replication […] upon reading Footnote 14 of their paper, we also learned this:

. . . In October 2024, at the request of the editors, we shared with Dan Ariely an analysis of the contents from the file purportedly for their Study 2 and asked for permission to include a summary of it in the paper. Dan Ariely denied our request, arguing, among other things, that the files we received may not be the actual data. He did not subsequently provide us with any additional data from the original paper. Consequently, we are unable to supplement our replication exercise with any additional analysis of the files we received in 2006 or any other data.

Additionally, Dan Ariely (the main contributor to the studies in question) opted their website out of the Wayback Machine, and if Louis Rossman ever teached me something, it's that people who do that very try to retcon the past.

Hard to go for a replication study if the original data is not available - hadn't Ariely sent out that mail in 2006, there wouldn't be any original data at all to compare to or to do sanity checks on.

Well Ariely didn't become a celebrity until these studies turned him into a rockstar in the academic economics world. So it seems to me to be more along the lines of him having been faking it the whole time, rather than trying to maintain momentum from an early success.