Cambridge University fraud scandal reminds me of Theranos.

This amazing story of the downfall of a Cambridge University education professor reminds me of Theranos, the fake-tech blood testing startup:

– A charismatic and wildly ambitious pathological liar who told people a story they wanted to hear.

– The support of powerful institutions, including apparent vetting by people who would be expected to know better.

– Evil lawyers using intimidation techniques to suppress independent reporting of the scandal.

– The problem was known for a long time but nothing was done about it. It was nearly ten years between when people first raised the alarm about Theranos and when it all started to come crashing down. In the case of the Cambridge sociologist, a plagiarism complaint was filed in 2023, but the university brushed it aside. As late as 2026 the university was still aggressively playing defense and lying about the case.

One thing that struck me is how low-budget the Cambridge scandal is. Theranos had a bunch of employees and constructed a whole fake lab with fake equipment. It was like a movie set. In contrast, the sociologist just wrote a bunch of crap papers. It’s funny that he got caught out on the plagiarism because he probably could’ve succeeded just by writing bad, contentless work that wasn’t plagiarized. Presumably he copied without attribution for the same reason as always–he wanted credit for work he didn’t do himself–but in this case it’s not like this was anything so amazing. It’s just that nobody was checking so I guess he figured, why not.

There’s an interesting comparison here to data fakers such as Brian Wansink and the mysterious colleagues who introduced fabricated data into the papers of Dan Ariely: they kind of needed to do the fraud because they were under pressure to come up with empirical results to produce the published papers that would satisfy the insatiable appetites of their career-building strategies. For empirical psychology, mere bullshit is not enough; you need actual data–or, actual fake data. So those guys really did have to fake their data. The only alternative would’ve been to do real experiments or to have lesser careers, and it seems that neither of those was an option.

But to go back to the Cambridge case, describing it as “plagiarism” seems to understate the problem. From Retraction Watch:

Arday numbered his participants from 1 to 32, but there were actually two 13s: One of them he described as a Black female undergraduate and the other as a Black male undergraduate. The Black male undergraduate, according to Arday, viewed clinicians as being instruments of oppression:

Let’s face it … with the stroke of a pen you could be sectioned or sent away for some counseling. Or … have administered some ridiculous dose of whatever kind of medicine.

A similar quote about clinicians appears in Memon et al. attributed to Male D in focus group 1:

With the stroke of a pen to decide whether you are going to be sectioned or whether you are going to be sent away for some counselling. Or … administered some really, really high doses of whatever kind of medicine.

The Black female undergraduate in Arday’s study expressed similar distrust toward the healthcare system:

Within African and West Indian communities … people do not trust psychiatrists in particular.

This sentiment, too, appears to come from Male D in Memon et al:

In the West Indian community … people do not trust psychiatrists particularly.

In the corrected version of Arday’s paper, the quote from the female 13 has been trimmed of the overlap, while the quote from the male 13 has been cut entirely. None of this is described clearly in the correction notice.

Yes, it’s plagiarism. But fundamentally the problem is that the data were faked. That’s why I’m referring to this as a fraud scandal rather than a plagiarism scandal. The major offense was the fraud; plagiarism was the means to that end.

To repeat: He didn’t just copy others’ words without attribution. He fabricated data for his study. To put it in political science terms, he’s “Michael Lacour,” not “Frank Fischer”

Apparently it happens in sociology sometimes, that researchers will say they did some interviews, but they really made them up. It’s less effort to write up a fake interview than to actually interview someone; also, you can make the fake interview fit better with your story. In this case, the sociologist used plagiarism to write the faked text; nowadays I guess he’s use a chatbot. It really is kind of pitiful that he couldn’t just make up the interview himself. Say what you want about Wansink and the collaborators of Ariely: at least they had the creativity to fake or manipulate the data themselves!

A few questions obvious arise, both with Theranos and the Cambridge fraud scandal.

1. How could so many people have missed the emptiness at the heart of the enterprise?

2. How could the fraud have stayed afloat for so many years after the problem was first identified?

For #1, I have several explanations:

a. Charisma. I imagine the fraudsters are very impressive in person. OK, I doubt they’d be impressive to me, but I’m not the person they’re trying to impress.

b. Wishful thinking. The fraudsters are telling people what they want to hear.

c. The whole “unicorn” thing. As you will recall, the unicorn is a mythical beast. Unicorns don’t exist, but that’s what people are looking for.

d. Something goes wrong in the evaluation process. People are hired, and millions of dollars are invested, without diligence. I guess this has something to do with the vagueness of the promises. The sociologist got hired not based on some specific thing he’d done but based on some unspecified future expectations. And Theranos got the big bucks not because of any actual technology but based on the unspecified hope that something would get invented. This links back to points a and b above.

And, for #2:

a. Sunk-cost fallacy.

b. The public relations cost of admitting error. Better to support a fraud and intimidate journalists than to tell the world that you did something stupid.

c. Sometimes frauds can stay afloat a long time. Think about it this way: Why, after 3 years, did Cambridge University deny deny deny? One reason is that, after 1 year, they denied denied denied and it worked, in the sense that the problem stayed under the rug. And, after 2 years, they denied denied denied and it worked. So why not continue after 3 years, 4 years, and so on?

d. Relatedly, sometimes you can keep denying and it does seem that the problem goes away. It seems to have worked with the University of California sleep expert, it worked with Laurence Tribe and other high-status plagiarists, for a long time it seemed to be working with Wansink, it still seems to work with Elon Musk. Sometimes people can play fast and loose with the truth and get away with it indefinitely. So that provides a motivation for managers who are dealing with current problems to keep on denying.

The other thing is that I’m guessing that the Cambridge sociologist and the Theranos promoter were very persuasive in small-group conversations.

Look at it this way: You might give someone a tenured professorship or millions of dollars in investments based on their work, if they have a really good idea or a track record of innovation. But if they don’t have anything like that backing them up, I think they’ve gotta be good talkers. I’m not even talking about “charisma” here; I just mean that they must have the ability to think on their feet, to respond to questions, to at least sound like they know what they’re talking about. I don’t see evidence of this in their writings, but I’m guessing that their live conversation is impressive. I guess I could go on Youtube and watch their lectures, but (a) a public talk isn’t the same as an interactive conversation, and (b) I have the energy to do a lot of things, but I don’t have the patience to watch some stupid videos.

The other thing is . . . selection bias. We’re looking at worst cases here. Cambridge has lots of professors and Silicon Valley has lots of startups. I’m guessing that very few are as bad as the two examples discussed here.

Still, to understand the problem, it’s good to try to figure out what went on in these disaster outcomes. Airline crashes are rare, but that doesn’t stop them from doing a careful inquiry after each one. I doubt that Theranos’s investors conducted such an inquiry or that Cambridge University will do so either. My own employer never seems to have conducted any inquiry into their U.S. News fabrications, to fire the perpetrators, understand what went wrong, and figure out how to stop that sort of behavior in the future. Nor have I heard of any inquiry at University of Nevada as to how they hired a completely unqualified person as dean of engineering. Obviously there was something wrong in the entire process. I seem to recall that Volkswagen did a report on their diesel-car fraud but that it was a whitewash, with the aim of minimizing the fallout rather than pursuing what really happened. That’s one reason it can be helpful to have an independent ombudsperson rather than relying the institutions themselves, which have both personal and reputational conflicts of interest.

P.S. More here: Who’s the most pitiful person in the Cambridge University fraud scandal? It’s not who you think.