As an academic, I did a lot of research trying to catch bad actors, everyone from cheating teachers to terrorists to sumo wrestlers who are throwing matches.

What I didn't do much of, though, was to try to catch cheating academics.

My guest today, Yuri Simonson, is a behavioral science professor who's transforming psychology

by identifying shoddy and fraudulent research.

Watching his exploits makes me wish I'd spent more time doing the same.

We talk about red flags versus smoking guns.

So red flags, that gives you, like, probable cause, so to speak.

But it's not enough to raise up an accusation of fraud.

That's a smoking gun.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

Uri Simons and two other academics, Joe Simmons and Leif Nelson, run a blog called Data Calata,

where they debug fraud, call out cheaters, and identify misleading research practices.

Yuri on his own has been doing this work for over a decade.

My Freakonomics friend and co-author, Stephenner spoke to the data-clotta team for a series

about academic fraud that ran on Freakonomics Radio in 2024.

But I admire Yuri and his collaborators so much that I wanted the chance to talk to him myself.

I started our conversation by asking about the research study that got him started in this direction.

The study that he read and said to himself, my God, this is outrageous.

I just can't take it anymore.

The first time I ever did any sort of commentary or criticism, I was asked to review a paper for a journal.

What they were studying was the impact of your name on your big life decisions.

The paper began with something like, it's been shown that people with the same initial

...