Thanks for sharing this. It is a good insight. WTF who cares, get the paycheck and whatever is an attitude far more common in industry than in academia.
Whether Ariely is honest or not, he is for sure not stupid; and it would be very stupid for him to fabricate data, let alone be so sloppy about it, make it public (which is rare) and then agree to a follow up paper about how the results did not replicate. Sorry, but a guy as smart as he is would cheat more effectively than that. That does not mean he is without fault. I suspect his lab is way too big. I also checked out his schedule once and he was speaking all over the world with a crazy travel schedule at the same time that he was managing that giant lab, coauthoring many papers, and employing way too many research assistants and post docs. Even if the folks on his team were 97% great, that still leaves room for a truly bad or at least very sloppy apple in the cart at that research center. No idea how anyone could do any thorough quality control with that many moving parts going on at once. I do suspect it was a mess created at the insurance company, or perhaps it was some new kid at the lab. Or perhaps Professor Plumb did it with the candlestick in the dining room. I don't have a "clue" (for those that remember the board game "Clue"). I just don't see Ariely doing such a sloppy job of fabricating data for a paper he did not need. I am not saying he would never cheat at all (again I don't have a clue), just that if he had cheated, he would have been smarter about it.
The bigger issue is that just about all these star researchers end up with MORE MORE MORE disease, which is taking over academia. People are working on more projects, giving more talks and writing more papers with more studies with more moderators and more mediators using more data sources and more research assistants and more post docs while also trying to write more books and give more talks to more audiences. Sorry, but a mess up is inevitable with that many things going on. Still, I hope this does not turn into a witch hunt after one guy, because the truth is that mistakes like this likely happen to all the star academics who have overextended themselves. How could they not?