Uri Simonsohn

Uri Simonsohn is a social psychologist and an associate professor in the Operations, Information & Decisions Department (OIDD) at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He worked on a project on false positives, and found that the data that social psychologist Dirk Smeesters collected in his papers did not seem to be real. He later posted a paper in Social Science Research Network that described the statistical method he used to expose suspiciously looking data in the work of Dirk Smeesters and Lawrence Sanna.^[1][2] His investigation ultimately led Erasmus University Rotterdam to lead its own investigation, which led to Smeester's resignation.^[3] Lawrence Sanna, similarly, resigned in May 2012. His work on detecting fraudulent work on psychology and economics was featured in a podcast with Julia Galef.^[4]

He is one of the figures who popularized the term "p-hacking" – a practice among some scientists when they try selecting their data under different conditions until they finally achieve an artificially false p-value of under .05.^[5] His simulations have shown that changes in a few data-analysis decisions can increase the false-positive rate in a single study to 60%.^[5]

He is author of the blog Data Colada.

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