Duke University business professor Dan Ariely is running for office in Israel, according to The Jerusalem Post. He’s declared candidacy in the country’s small Pirate Party and appeared at the Israeli legislature on Monday sporting a pirate hat.

The fringe Pirate Party — which advocates primarily for intellectual property reform and freedom of information — is not expected to win any seats this year. Still, Ariely’s candidacy is turning heads. By way of explanation for this foray into statecraft, he offered only: “Politics is fun,” according to The Jerusalem Post.

The announcement comes on the heels of a high-profile research fraud finding in Ariely’s work — the kind that’s plagued his career for years now.

Ariely is the best-selling author of books on human behavior and decision-making. His work focuses on irrationality, mistakes, and dishonesty.

Research paper retractions

But earlier this month, a research paper of Ariely’s was retracted by Psychological Science after other researchers trying to replicate the study found evidence of data fraud, The Duke Chronicle reported.

“We are unable to generate a benign explanation for all of the anomalies presented here,” researchers at Data Colada, a blog that examines behavioral science research, wrote in a post from late August that led to the retraction. “... Based on this evidence, we believe the data for Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) were severely tampered with or fabricated to produce the desired results.”

Ariely addressed the findings in a statement on his website, writing that the “documentary record I have at my disposal today about those experiments isn’t sufficient to answer the questions that have been raised, and more than two decades, and hundreds of experiments later, my memory is similarly insufficient.”

It’s not the first time this has happened to Ariely. A 2012 study on honesty he coauthored was retracted in 2021 after similar issues were found, The News & Observer previously reported. Duke’s investigation found no evidence that Ariely falsified data, but concluded he should have done more to prevent the data’s publication.

Regarding this more recent retraction, a university spokesperson told The News & Observer Friday: “Duke takes these concerns seriously and is carefully evaluating them. We cannot comment on specific personnel actions that may be in progress in response. Duke is committed to upholding the highest standards of research integrity in all aspects of our academic and scholarly work conducted at Duke, in alignment with our Duke Values.”

Duke did not answer questions about whether Ariely is still teaching courses at Duke.

Ties to Jeffrey Epstein

Ariely is no stranger to bad press. When the Justice Department released the emails of notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein earlier this year, Ariely’s name appeared more than 700 times, The News & Observer previously reported.

Communications between the two men stretched from 2010 to 2018 — and included Ariely asking Epstein for “the name and email of the redhead” Epstein had introduced him to. “She seemed very very smart and I would love to be able to meet her again at some point,” Ariely wrote.

Epstein made other wishes of Ariely’s come true, including booking him a private tour of the Ferrari factory in 2017, The N&O reported.

Ariely did not respond to a request for comment from The N&O in time for publication.

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