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For anyone who teaches at a business school, the blog post was bad news. For Juliana Schroeder, it was catastrophic. She saw the allegations when they first went up, on a Saturday in early summer 2023. Schroeder teaches management and psychology at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. One of her colleagues—­­a star professor at Harvard Business School named Francesca Gino—­had just been accused of academic fraud. The authors of the blog post, a small team of business-school researchers, had found discrepancies in four of Gino’s published papers, and they suggested that the scandal was much larger. “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data,” the blog post said. “Perhaps dozens.”

The story was soon picked up by the mainstream press. Reporters reveled in the irony that Gino, who had made her name as an expert on the psychology of breaking rules, may herself have broken them. (“Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings,” a New York Times headline read.) Harvard Business School had quietly placed Gino on administrative leave just before the blog post appeared. The school had conducted its own investigation; its nearly 1,300-page internal report, which was made public only in the course of related legal proceedings, concluded that Gino “committed research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” in the four papers. (Gino has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing.)

Schroeder’s interest in the scandal was more personal. Gino was one of her most consistent and important research partners. Their names appear together on seven peer-reviewed articles, as well as 26 conference talks. If Gino were indeed a serial cheat, then all of that shared work—and a large swath of Schroeder’s CV—was now at risk. When a senior academic is accused of fraud, the reputations of her honest, less established colleagues may get dragged down too. “Just think how horrible it is,” Katy Milkman, another of Gino’s research partners and a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me. “It could ruin your life.”

Juliana Schroeder (LinkedIn)

To head that off, Schroeder began her own audit of all the research papers that she’d ever done with Gino, seeking out raw data from each experiment and attempting to rerun the analyses. As that summer progressed, her efforts grew more ambitious. With the help of several colleagues, Schroeder pursued a plan to verify not just her own work with Gino, but a major portion of Gino’s scientific résumé. The group started reaching out to every other researcher who had put their name on one of Gino’s 138 co-authored studies. The Many Co-Authors Project, as the self-audit would be called, aimed to flag any additional work that might be tainted by allegations of misconduct and, more important, to absolve the rest—and Gino’s colleagues, by extension—of the wariness that now afflicted the entire field.

That field was not tucked away in some sleepy corner of academia, but was instead a highly influential one devoted to the science of success. Perhaps you’ve heard that procrastination makes you more creative, or that you’re better off having fewer choices, or that you can buy happiness by giving things away. All of that is research done by Schroeder’s peers—­business-school professors who apply the methods of behavioral research to such subjects as marketing, management, and decision making. In viral TED Talks and airport best sellers, on morning shows and late-night television, these business-school psychologists hold tremendous sway. They also have a presence in this magazine and many others: Nearly every business academic who is named in this story has been either quoted or cited by The Atlantic on multiple occasions. A few, including Gino, have written articles for The Atlantic themselves.

Francesca Gino (LinkedIn)

Business-school psychologists are scholars, but they aren’t shooting for a Nobel Prize. Their research doesn’t typically aim to solve a social problem; it won’t be curing anyone’s disease. It doesn’t even seem to have much influence on business practices, and it certainly hasn’t shaped the nation’s commerce. Still, its flashy findings come with clear rewards: consulting gigs and speakers’ fees, not to mention lavish academic incomes. Starting salaries at business schools can be $240,000 a year—double what they are at campus psychology departments, academics told me.

The research scandal that has engulfed this field goes far beyond the replication crisis that has plagued psychology and other disciplines in recent years. Long-standing flaws in how scientific work is done—including insufficient sample sizes and the sloppy application of statistics—have left large segments of the research literature in doubt. Many avenues of study once deemed promising turned out to be dead ends. But it’s one thing to understand that scientists have been cutting corners. It’s quite another to suspect that they’ve been creating their results from scratch.

[Read: Psychology’s replication crisis has a silver lining]

Schroeder has long been interested in trust. She’s given lectures on “building trust-based relationships”; she’s run experiments measuring trust in colleagues. Now she was working to rebuild the sense of trust within her field. A lot of scholars were involved in the Many Co-Authors Project, but Schroeder’s dedication was singular. In October 2023, a former graduate student who had helped tip off the team of bloggers to Gino’s possible fraud wrote her own “post mortem” on the case. It paints Schroeder as exceptional among her peers: a professor who “sent a clear signal to the scientific community that she is taking this scandal seriously.” Several others echoed this assessment, saying that ever since the news broke, Schroeder has been relentless—heroic, even—in her efforts to correct the record.

But if Schroeder planned to extinguish any doubts that remained, she may have aimed too high. More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied. The rot in business schools runs much deeper than almost anyone had guessed, and the blame is unnervingly widespread. In the end, even Schroeder would become a suspect.

Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected—and it was one that she herself had helped write.

The work, titled “Don’t Stop Believing: Rituals Improve Performance by Decreasing Anxiety,” was published in 2016, with Schroeder’s name listed second out of seven authors. Gino’s name was fourth. (The first few names on an academic paper are typically arranged in order of their contributions to the finished work.) The research it described was pretty standard for the field: a set of clever studies demonstrating the value of a life hack—one simple trick to nail your next presentation. The authors had tested the idea that simply following a routine—even one as arbitrary as drawing something on a piece of paper, sprinkling salt over it, and crumpling it up—could help calm a person’s nerves. “Although some may dismiss rituals as irrational,” the authors wrote, “those who enact rituals may well outperform the skeptics who forgo them.”

In truth, the skeptics have never had much purchase in business-school psychology. For the better part of a decade, this finding had been garnering citations—­about 200, per Google Scholar. But when Schroeder looked more closely at the work, she realized it was questionable. In October 2023, she sketched out some of her concerns on the Many Co-Authors Project website.

The paper’s first two key experiments, marked in the text as Studies 1a and 1b, looked at how the salt-and-paper ritual might help students sing a karaoke version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” in a lab setting. According to the paper, Study 1a found that people who did the ritual before they sang reported feeling much less anxious than people who did not; Study 1b confirmed that they had lower heart rates, as measured with a pulse oximeter, than students who did not.

As Schroeder noted in her October post, the original records of these studies could not be found. But Schroeder did have some data spreadsheets for Studies 1a and 1b—she’d posted them shortly after the paper had been published, along with versions of the studies’ research questionnaires—and she now wrote that “unexplained issues were identified” in both, and that there was “uncertainty regarding the data provenance” for the latter. Schroeder’s post did not elaborate, but anyone can look at the spreadsheets, and it doesn’t take a forensic expert to see that the numbers they report are seriously amiss.

The “unexplained issues” with Studies 1a and 1b are legion. For one thing, the figures as reported don’t appear to match the research as described in other public documents. (For example, where the posted research questionnaire instructs the students to assess their level of anxiety on a five-point scale, the results seem to run from 2 to 8.) But the single most suspicious pattern shows up in the heart-rate data. According to the paper, each student had their pulse measured three times: once at the very start, again after they were told they’d have to sing the karaoke song, and then a third time, right before the song began. I created three graphs to illustrate the data’s peculiarities. They depict the measured heart rates for each of the 167 students who are said to have participated in the experiment, presented from left to right in their numbered order on the spreadsheet. The blue and green lines, which depict the first and second heart-rate measurements, show those values fluctuating more or less as one might expect for a noisy signal, measured from lots of individuals. But the red line doesn’t look like this at all: Rather, the measured heart rates form a series going up, across a run of more than 100 consecutive students.

DATA FROM “DON’T STOP BELIEVING: RITUALS IMPROVE PERFORMANCE BY DECREASING ANXIETY” (2016), STUDY 1B (Charts by The Atlantic. Based on data posted to OSF.io.)

I’ve reviewed the case with several researchers who suggested that this tidy run of values is indicative of fraud. “I see absolutely no reason” the sequence in No. 3 “should have the order that it does,” James Heathers, a scientific-­integrity investigator and an occasional Atlantic contributor, told me. The exact meaning of the pattern is unclear; if you were fabricating data, you certainly wouldn’t strive for them to look like this. Nick Brown, a scientific-integrity researcher affiliated with Linnaeus University Sweden, guessed that the ordered values in the spreadsheet may have been cooked up after the fact. In that case, it might have been less important that they formed a natural-­looking plot than that, when analyzed together, they matched fake statistics that had already been reported. “Someone sat down and burned quite a bit of midnight oil,” he proposed. I asked how sure he was that this pattern of results was the product of deliberate tampering; “100 percent, 100 percent,” he told me. “In my view, there is no innocent explanation in a universe where fairies don’t exist.”

Schroeder herself would come to a similar conclusion. Months later, I asked her whether the data were manipulated. “I think it’s very likely that they were,” she said. In the summer of 2023, when she reported the findings of her audit to her fellow authors, they all agreed that, whatever really happened, the work was compromised and ought to be retracted. But they could not reach consensus on who had been at fault. Gino did not appear to be responsible for either of the paper’s karaoke studies. Then who was?

This would not seem to be a tricky question. The published version of the paper has two lead authors who are listed as having “contributed equally” to the work. One of them was Schroeder. All of the co-authors agree that she handled two experiments—labeled in the text as Studies 3 and 4—in which participants solved a set of math problems. The other main contributor was Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino’s at Harvard Business School.

From the start, there was every reason to assume that Brooks had run the studies that produced the fishy data. Certainly they are similar to Brooks’s prior work. The same quirky experimental setup—in which students were asked to wear a pulse oximeter and sing a karaoke version of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”—­appears in her dissertation from the Wharton School in 2013, and she published a portion of that work in a sole-authored paper the following year. (Brooks herself is musically inclined, performing around Boston in a rock band.)

Yet despite all of this, Brooks told the Many Co-Authors Project that she simply wasn’t sure whether she’d had access to the raw data for Study 1b, the one with the “no innocent explanation” pattern of results. She also said she didn’t know whether Gino played a role in collecting them. On the latter point, Brooks’s former Ph.D. adviser, Maurice Schweitzer, expressed the same uncertainty to the Many Co-Authors Project.

Plenty of evidence now suggests that this mystery was manufactured. The posted materials for Study 1b, along with administrative records from the lab, indicate that the work was carried out at Wharton, where Brooks was in grad school at the time, studying under Schweitzer and running another, very similar experiment. Also, the metadata for the oldest public version of the data spreadsheet lists “Alison Wood Brooks” as the last person who saved the file.

Alison Wood Brooks (LinkedIn)

Brooks, who has published research on the value of apologies, and whose first book—Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves—is due out from Crown in January, did not respond to multiple requests for interviews or to a detailed list of written questions. Gino said that she “neither collected nor analyzed the data for Study 1a or Study 1b nor was I involved in the data audit.”

If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then Schroeder’s audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino’s suspect work, and quarantine it from the rest. “The goal was to protect the innocent victims, and to find out what’s true about the science that had been done,” Milkman told me. But now, to all appearances, Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren’t linked to Gino. That would mean Schroeder had another colleague who had contaminated her research. It would mean that her reputation—and the credibility of her entire field—was under threat from multiple directions at once.

Among the four research papers in which Gino was accused of cheating is one about the human tendency to misreport facts and figures for personal gain. Which is to say: She was accused of faking data for a study of when and how people might fake data. Amazingly, a different set of data from the same paper had already been flagged as the product of potential fraud, two years before the Gino scandal came to light. The first was contributed by Dan Ariely of Duke University—a frequent co-author of Gino’s and, like her, a celebrated expert on the psychology of telling lies. (Ariely has said that a Duke investigation—which the school has not acknowledged—discovered no evidence that he “falsified data or knowingly used falsified data.” He has also said that the investigation “determined that I should have done more to prevent faulty data from being published in the 2012 paper.”)

The existence of two apparently corrupted data sets was shocking: a keystone paper on the science of deception wasn’t just invalid, but possibly a scam twice over. But even in the face of this ignominy, few in business academia were ready to acknowledge, in the summer of 2023, that the problem might be larger still—and that their research literature might well be overrun with fantastical results.

Some scholars had tried to raise alarms before. In 2019, Dennis Tourish, a professor at the University of Sussex Business School, published a book titled Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research. He cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they’ve encountered fabricated or falsified data. Even that alarming rate may undersell the problem, Tourish told me, given all of the misbehavior in his discipline that gets overlooked or covered up.

Anonymous surveys of various fields find that roughly 2 percent of scholars will admit to having fabricated, falsified, or modified data at least once in their career. But business-school psychology may be especially prone to misbehavior. For one thing, the field’s research standards are weaker than those for other psychologists. In response to the replication crisis, campus psychology departments have lately taken up a raft of methodological reforms. Statistically suspect practices that were de rigueur a dozen years ago are now uncommon; sample sizes have gotten bigger; a study’s planned analyses are now commonly written down before the work is carried out. But this great awakening has been slower to develop in business-school psychology, several academics told me. “No one wants to kill the golden goose,” one early-career researcher in business academia said. If management and marketing professors embraced all of psychology’s reforms, he said, then many of their most memorable, most TED Talk–able findings would go away. “To use marketing lingo, we’d lose our unique value proposition.”

It’s easy to imagine how cheating might lead to more cheating. If business-school psychology is beset with suspect research, then the bar for getting published in its flagship journals ratchets up: A study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out. Such incentives move in only one direction: Eventu­ally, the standard tools for torturing your data will no longer be enough. Now you have to go a little further; now you have to cut your data up, and carve them into sham results. Having one or two prolific frauds around would push the bar for publishing still higher, inviting yet more corruption. (And because the work is not exactly brain surgery, no one dies as a result.) In this way, a single discipline might come to look like Major League Baseball did 20 years ago: defined by juiced-up stats.

In the face of its own cheating scandal, MLB started screening every single player for anabolic steroids. There is no equivalent in science, and certainly not in business academia. Uri Simonsohn, a professor at the Esade Business School in Barcelona, is a member of the blogging team, called Data Colada, that caught the problems in both Gino’s and Ariely’s work. (He was also a motivating force behind the Many Co-Authors Project.) Data Colada has called out other instances of sketchy work and apparent fakery within the field, but its efforts at detection are highly targeted. They’re also quite unusual. Crying foul on someone else’s bad research makes you out to be a troublemaker, or a member of the notional “data police.” It can also bring a claim of defamation. Gino filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against Harvard and the Data Colada team not long after the bloggers attacked her work. (This past September, a judge dismissed the portion of her claims that involved the bloggers and the defamation claim against Harvard. She still has pending claims against the university for gender discrimination and breach of contract.) The risks are even greater for those who don’t have tenure. A junior academic who accuses someone else of fraud may antagonize the senior colleagues who serve on the boards and committees that make publishing decisions and determine funding and job appointments.

[Read: Francesca Gino, the Harvard expert on dishonesty who is accused of lying]

These risks for would-be critics reinforce an atmosphere of complacency. “It’s embarrassing how few protections we have against fraud and how easy it has been to fool us,” Simonsohn said in a 2023 webinar. He added, “We have done nothing to prevent it. Nothing.”

Like so many other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred. (Harvard Business School’s head of communications, Mark Cautela, declined to comment.) Her efforts to address the issue through the University of Pennsylvania’s Office of Research Integrity likewise seemed fruitless. (A spokesperson for the Wharton School would not comment on “the existence or status of” any investigations.)

Retractions have a way of dragging out in science publishing. This one was no exception. Maryam Kouchaki, an expert on workplace ethics at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and co–editor in chief of the journal that published the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper, had first received the authors’ call to pull their work in August 2023. As the anniversary of that request drew near, Schroeder still had no idea how the suspect data would be handled, and whether Brooks—or anyone else—would be held responsible.

Finally, on October 1, the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper was removed from the scientific literature. The journal’s published notice laid out some basic conclusions from Schroeder’s audit: Studies 1a and 1b had indeed been run by Brooks, the raw data were not available, and the posted data for 1b showed “streaks of heart rate ratings that were unlikely to have occurred naturally.” Schroeder’s own contributions to the paper were also found to have some flaws: Data points had been dropped from her analysis without any explanation in the published text. (Although this practice wasn’t fully out-of-bounds given research standards at the time, the same behavior would today be understood as a form of “p-hacking”—a pernicious source of false-positive results.) But the notice did not say whether the fishy numbers from Study 1b had been fabricated, let alone by whom. Someone other than Brooks may have handled those data before publication, it suggested. “The journal could not investigate this study any further.”

Two days later, Schroeder posted to X a link to her full and final audit of the paper. “It took *hundreds* of hours of work to complete this retraction,” she wrote, in a thread that described the flaws in her own experiments and Studies 1a and 1b. “I am ashamed of helping publish this paper & how long it took to identify its issues,” the thread concluded. “I am not the same scientist I was 10 years ago. I hold myself accountable for correcting any inaccurate prior research findings and for updating my research practices to do better.” Her peers responded by lavishing her with public praise. One colleague called the self-audit “exemplary” and an “act of courage.” A prominent professor at Columbia Business School congratulated Schroeder for being “a cultural heroine, a role model for the rising generation.”

But amid this celebration of her unusual transparency, an important and related story had somehow gone unnoticed. In the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming science fraud. And this time, she’d blown the whistle on herself.

That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors Project website. Schroeder announced that she’d found “an issue” with one more paper that she’d produced with Gino. This one, “Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-Control,” came out in 2018 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; its author list overlaps substantially with that of the earlier “Don’t Stop Believing” paper (though Brooks was not involved). Like the first, it describes a set of studies that purport to show the power of the ritual effect. Like the first, it includes at least one study for which data appear to have been altered. And like the first, its data anomalies have no apparent link to Gino.

The basic facts are laid out in a document that Schroeder put into an online repository, describing an internal audit that she conducted with the help of the lead author, Allen Ding Tian. (Tian did not respond to requests for comment.) The paper opens with a field experiment on women who were trying to lose weight. Schroeder, then in grad school at the University of Chicago, oversaw the work; participants were recruited at a campus gym.

Half of the women were instructed to perform a ritual before each meal for the next five days: They were to put their food into a pattern on their plate. The other half were not. Then Schroeder used a diet-tracking app to tally all the food that each woman reported eating, and found that the ones in the ritual group took in about 200 fewer calories a day, on average, than the others. But in 2023, when she started digging back into this research, she uncovered some discrepancies. According to her study’s raw materials, nine of the women who reported that they’d done the food-arranging ritual were listed on the data spreadsheet as being in the control group; six others were mislabeled in the opposite direction. When Schroeder fixed these errors for her audit, the ritual effect completely vanished. Now it looked as though the women who’d done the food-arranging had consumed a few more calories, on average, than the women who had not.

Mistakes happen in research; sometimes data get mixed up. These errors, though, appear to be intentional. The women whose data had been swapped fit a suspicious pattern: The ones whose numbers might have undermined the paper’s hypothesis were disproportionately affected. This is not a subtle thing; among the 43 women who reported that they’d done the ritual, the six most prolific eaters all got switched into the control group. Nick Brown and James Heathers, the scientific-integrity researchers, have each tried to figure out the odds that anything like the study’s published result could have been attained if the data had been switched at random. Brown’s analysis pegged the answer at one in 1 million. “Data manipulation makes sense as an explanation,” he told me. “No other explanation is immediately obvious to me.” Heathers said he felt “quite comfortable” in concluding that whatever went wrong with the experiment “was a directed process, not a random process.”

Whether or not the data alterations were intentional, their specific form—flipped conditions for a handful of participants, in a way that favored the hypothesis—matches up with data issues raised by Harvard Business School’s investigation into Gino’s work. Schroeder rejected that comparison when I brought it up, but she was willing to accept some blame. “I couldn’t feel worse about that paper and that study,” she told me. “I’m deeply ashamed of it.”

Still, she said that the source of the error wasn’t her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused. She said that two RAs, both undergraduates, had recruited the women at the gym, and that the scene there was chaotic: Sometimes multiple people came up to them at once, and the undergrads may have had to make some changes on the fly, adjusting which participants were being put into which group for the study. Maybe things went wrong from there, Schroeder said. One or both RAs might have gotten ruffled as they tried to paper over inconsistencies in their record-keeping. They both knew what the experiment was meant to show, and how the data ought to look—so it’s possible that they peeked a little at the data and reassigned the numbers in the way that seemed correct. (Schroeder’s audit lays out other possibilities, but describes this one as the most likely.)

Schroeder’s account is certainly plausible, but it’s not a perfect fit with all of the facts. For one thing, the posted data indicate that during most days on which the study ran, the RAs had to deal with only a handful of participants—sometimes just two. How could they have gotten so bewildered?

Any further details seem unlikely to emerge. The paper was formally retracted in the February issue of the journal. Schroeder has chosen not to name the RAs who helped her with the study, and she told me that she hasn’t tried to contact them. “I just didn’t think it was appropriate,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like it would help matters at all.” By her account, neither one is currently in academia, and she did not discover any additional issues when she reviewed their other work. (I reached out to more than a dozen former RAs and lab managers who were thanked in Schroeder’s published papers from around this time. Five responded to my queries; all of them denied having helped with this experiment.) In the end, Schroeder said, she took the data at the assistants’ word. “I did not go in and change labels,” she told me. But she also said repeatedly that she doesn’t think her RAs should take the blame. “The responsibility rests with me, right? And so it was appropriate that I’m the one named in the retraction notice,” she said. Later in our conversation, she summed up her response: “I’ve tried to trace back as best I can what happened, and just be honest.”

Across the many months I spent reporting this story, I’d come to think of Schroeder as a paragon of scientific rigor. She has led a seminar on “Experimental Design and Research Methods” in a business program with a sterling reputation for its research standards. She’d helped set up the Many Co-Authors Project, and then pursued it as aggressively as anyone. (Simonsohn even told me that Schroeder’s look-at-everything approach was a little “overboard.”) I also knew that she was devoted to the dreary but important task of reproducing other people’s published work.

As for the dieting research, Schroeder had owned the awkward optics. “It looks weird,” she told me when we spoke in June. “It’s a weird error, and it looks consistent with changing things in the direction to get a result.” But weirder still was how that error came to light, through a detailed data audit that she’d undertaken of her own accord. Apparently, she’d gone to great effort to call attention to a damning set of facts. That alone could be taken as a sign of her commitment to transparency.

But in the months that followed, I couldn’t shake the feeling that another theory also fit the facts. Schroeder’s leading explanation for the issues in her work—An RA must have bungled the data—sounded distressingly familiar. Francesca Gino had offered up the same defense to Harvard’s investigators. The mere repetition of this story doesn’t mean that it’s invalid: Lab techs and assistants really do mishandle data on occasion, and they may of course engage in science fraud. But still.

As for Schroeder’s all-out focus on integrity, and her public efforts to police the scientific record, I came to understand that most of these had been adopted, all at once, in mid-2023, shortly after the Gino scandal broke. (The version of Schroeder’s résumé that was available on her webpage in the spring of 2023 does not describe any replication projects whatsoever.) That makes sense if the accusations changed the way she thought about her field—and she did describe them to me as “a wake-up call.” But here’s another explanation: Maybe Schroeder saw the Gino scandal as a warning that the data sleuths were on the march. Perhaps she figured that her own work might end up being scrutinized, and then, having gamed this out, she decided to be a data sleuth herself. She’d publicly commit to reexamining her colleagues’ work, doing audits of her own, and asking for corrections. This would be her play for amnesty during a crisis.

I spoke with Schroeder for the last time on the day before Halloween. She was notably composed when I confronted her with the possibility that she’d engaged in data-tampering herself. She repeated what she’d told me months before, that she definitely did not go in and change the numbers in her study. And she rejected the idea that her self-audits had been strategic, that she’d used them to divert attention from her own wrongdoing. “Honestly, it’s disturbing to hear you even lay it out,” she said. “Because I think if you were to look at my body of work and try to replicate it, I think my hit rate would be good.” She continued: “So to imply that I’ve actually been, I don’t know, doing a lot of fraudulent stuff myself for a long time, and this was a moment to come clean with it? I just don’t think the evidence bears that out.”

That wasn’t really what I’d meant to imply. The story I had in mind was more mundane—and in a sense more tragic. I went through it: Perhaps she’d fudged the results for a study just once or twice early in her career, and never again. Perhaps she’d been committed, ever since, to proper scientific methods. And perhaps she really did intend to fix some problems in her field.

Schroeder allowed that she’d been susceptible to certain research practices—excluding data, for example—that are now considered improper. So were many of her colleagues. In that sense, she’d been guilty of letting her judgment be distorted by the pressure to succeed. But I understood what she was saying: This was not the same as fraud.

Throughout our conversations, Schroeder had avoided stating outright that anyone in particular had committed fraud. But not all of her colleagues had been so cautious. Just a few days earlier, I’d received an unexpected message from Maurice Schweitzer, the senior Wharton business-school professor who oversaw Alison Wood Brooks’s “Don’t Stop Believing” research. Up to this point, he had not responded to my request for an interview, and I figured he’d chosen not to comment for this story. But he finally responded to a list of written questions. It was important for me to know, his email said, that Schroe­der had “been involved in data tampering.” He included a link to the retraction notice for her paper on rituals and eating. When I asked Schweitzer to elaborate, he did not respond. (Schweitzer’s most recent academic work is focused on the damaging effects of gossip; one of his papers from 2024 is titled “The Interpersonal Costs of Revealing Others’ Secrets.”)

I laid this out for Schroeder on the phone. “Wow,” she said. “That’s unfortunate that he would say that.” She went silent for a long time. “Yeah, I’m sad he’s saying that.”

Another long silence followed. “I think that the narrative that you laid out, Dan, is going to have to be a possibility,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a way I can refute it, but I know what the truth is, and I think I did the right thing, with trying to clean the literature as much as I could.”

This is all too often where these stories end: A researcher will say that whatever really happened must forever be obscure. Dan Ariely told Business Insider in February 2024 : “I’ve spent a big part of the last two years trying to find out what happened. I haven’t been able to … I decided I have to move on with my life.” Schweit­zer told me that the most relevant files for the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper are “long gone,” and that the chain of custody for its data simply can’t be tracked. (The Wharton School agreed, telling me that it “does not possess the requested data” for Study 1b, “as it falls outside its current data retention period.”) And now Schroeder had landed on a similar position.

It’s uncomfortable for a scientist to claim that the truth might be unknowable, just as it would be for a journalist, or any other truth-seeker by vocation. I daresay the facts regarding all of these cases may yet be amenable to further inquiry. The raw data from Study 1b may still exist, somewhere; if so, one might compare them with the posted spreadsheet to confirm that certain numbers had been altered. And Schroeder says she has the names of the RAs who worked on her dieting experiment; in theory, she could ask those people for their recollections of what happened. If figures aren’t checked, or questions aren’t asked, it’s by choice.

What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be untouched. “The problem is that journal editors and institutions can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than finding out the truth,” Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex Business School, told me. “It can be easier to hope that this all just goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it.”

Pablo Delcan

Some degree of disillusionment was common among the academics I spoke with for this story. The early-career researcher in business academia told me that he has an “unhealthy hobby” of finding manipulated data. But now, he said, he’s giving up the fight. “At least for the time being, I’m done,” he told me. “Feeling like Sisyphus isn’t the most fulfilling experience.” A management professor who has followed all of these cases very closely gave this assessment: “I would say that distrust characterizes many people in the field—­it’s all very depressing and demotivating.”

It’s possible that no one is more depressed and demotivated, at this point, than Juliana Schroeder. “To be honest with you, I’ve had some very low moments where I’m like, ‘Well, maybe this is not the right field for me, and I shouldn’t be in it,’ ” she said. “And to even have any errors in any of my papers is incredibly embarrassing, let alone one that looks like data-tampering.”

I asked her if there was anything more she wanted to say.

“I guess I just want to advocate for empathy and transparency—­maybe even in that order. Scientists are imperfect people, and we need to do better, and we can do better.” Even the Many Co-Authors Project, she said, has been a huge missed opportunity. “It was sort of like a moment where everyone could have done self-reflection. Everyone could have looked at their papers and done the exercise I did. And people didn’t.”

Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, she said. “The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we’ll self-correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked.

“On my optimistic days, I believe it.”

“Is today an optimistic day?”

“Not really.”

This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “The Fraudulent Science of Success.”

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How do you know when a democracy slips into autocracy or fascism or some other less-free and less-savory form of society? Do they hang out a sign? Post it on X? Announce it on the newly state-controlled news channel? In the run-up to Donald Trump’s election, and even all the way back to his first administration, people who study autocracies in other countries have shown us how to spot the clues. One reliable teacher has been Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc. and co-host of the podcast series Autocracy in America. Over the years, Applebaum has situated Trump’s musings in a broader historical context. She’s pointed out, for example, that when Trump fired government watchdogs in his last administration or talked about deploying troops against protesters, those are actions that other dictators have taken.

In the last few months of his campaign, Trump was free and open with his dictatorial impulses as he talked about punishing “enemies from within.” Now that he’s won, have we crossed the line into a different kind of country? In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Applebaum joins political writer McKay Coppins to help us know how to find the line. Does this resounding win mean the electorate gave Trump a mandate to act on all his impulses? Does he mean what he says? And how will we know?

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. So Donald Trump won. It’s looking like he won every swing state and, also, like there was a rightward shift even in the states he lost. He won even though, in the last months of his campaign, he was at his darkest and most crude. None of that mattered, apparently.

So here to help us understand what happened are two Atlantic staff writers: Anne Applebaum, who covers threats to democracy—hi, Anne—

Anne Applebaum: Hello.

Rosin: —and political reporter McKay Coppins. Hi, McKay.

McKay Coppins: Hey.

Rosin: So, McKay, what do we know about how he won? The particular coalition, the demographics—what do we know so far?

Coppins: Well, you just got at it. I think that the most surprising thing is not that he won—because the polls were so tight, and everyone was warning us to be prepared for either candidate coming out victorious—but the fact that he won so decisively, making gains in almost every state and almost every demographic group is something that I think most people were not prepared for.

Just to run through a few of the highlights: He made major gains with Latino voters, according to exit polls. It depends on which exit poll you’re looking at, but Harris won Latinos by between eight and 15 points. That is a lot less than Biden’s roughly 30-point win among Latino voters four years ago.

He made some more modest gains with Black voters, especially young Black men. A lot of Trump’s gains were concentrated with men. One exit poll showed him narrowly winning Latino men; the other one showed him narrowly losing them. But in either case, that is dramatically outperforming his performance in 2020.

And so, you know, you take all this together, and what you see is that there is a rightward shift at almost every section of the electorate. And, you know, that includes parts of the Democratic coalition that Kamala Harris and her campaign thought they could take for granted coming into this race.

Rosin: And is it just men? Like, everyone you mentioned were men. It’s like, Latino men, young Black men—

Coppins: It definitely was. He definitely did better—

Rosin: (Laughs.) Sorry, McKay.

Coppins: (Laughs.) Not to speak for my entire gender here, but he did seem to do much better among men. Though, I will note that, coming into the campaign, a lot of Democrats had pinned their hopes on the idea that Dobbs would motivate a surge of women to support Harris.

And we’re so early now that it’s still hard to tell from the exit-poll data how much that happened, but it is worth noting that Trump won white women in this election. He won them narrowly, but there was some hope among Democrats that Dobbs would push independent and even former Republican white women to the Harris camp. That does not seem to have happened in the numbers that they were planning for.

Rosin: So all of that is somewhat surprising and things we have to reckon with over the next many months and years.

Anne, you have been helping us understand, over many years, what it looks like when a country or democracy drifts towards autocracy. How do you read this moment?

Applebaum: So I read this moment not so much as something new but as a continuation of things that we’ve seen in the past. I felt that, during the campaign, it would be useful for me to record some of the things the president was saying, to say how they echoed in history, to comment on how those things compared to what has happened in other countries.

I did a podcast about this with The Atlantic. It’s called Autocracy in America. When he was last in the White House, Trump ignored ethics and security guidelines. He fired inspectors general and other watchdogs. He leaked classified information. You know, he used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state, kind of deploying troops in American cities.

Obviously, he encouraged the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. When he left the White House, he took classified documents with him, and then he hid them from the FBI. I mean, all those things are indicative of somebody who is in defiance of the rule of law, who thinks he’s above the rule of law, who’s seeking to avoid normal rules of transparency and accountability, who wants to help his staff get around, as I said, things like security, clearance, guidelines, and so on.

And those things do represent a break with all previous presidents in modern history: Republican, Democrat, left wing, right wing—all of them. We didn’t have a president before who defied those kinds of rules and norms and laws and respect for some basic principles of the Constitution before.

The fact is that people either liked it that he was doing that—they found the transgressiveness attractive, along with the language that he used about his enemies, you know, calling them “vermin” and the “enemy within” and so on. Either that was appealing—and, of course, that kind of language historically has been appealing; it does appeal to people—or they didn’t care.

But that means that there has been a shift in how Americans see their government, what they understand the Constitution is for. And that shift clearly precedes Trump. I mean, probably he helped shape it during his first term. He helped shape it during the four years he was out of power. But we now have a country that is prepared to accept things from their leader that would have tanked the career of anybody else eight years ago.

Rosin: So did you wake up on Wednesday morning and think, I live in a different country than I thought I did?

Applebaum: No. I mean, I thought from the beginning of this election campaign—I thought it was possible that he would win. I mean, I suppose, particularly the last couple weeks of his campaign, when he became darker and darker and more and more vitriolic, you know, I wondered whether some of that would bother people.

You know, the imagining guns trained at Liz Cheney, you know, talking about his enemies as the enemy within, talking about using the expression vermin or poison blood—these are terms that are directly taken from the 1930s and haven’t been used in American politics before. So I wondered whether people would be bothered by that.

But am I entirely surprised that they weren’t? No, I’m not. I think the population is now immune to that kind of language, or maybe they like it.

Coppins: Yeah, I would just say: I think that is one of the legacies of the Trump era, is how much he has successfully desensitized the country to this kind of rhetoric and behavior that, in an era not that long ago, voters would have deemed disqualifying.

He has managed to convince enough Americans that this kind of behavior, this kind of rhetoric is okay or, at least, that it doesn’t matter that much. And looking forward, I do think that’s going to be something we live with in our politics long after Trump is gone.

Rosin: I mean, there’s one way of looking at what you both are saying, which is: We woke up today; we have confirmation that we live in a failing democracy. But we actually don’t. All we have confirmation of is that people either don’t care that he talks like an autocratic ruler, they don’t notice, they like it, or they don’t put it in a broader historical context, which is that these are actual signs of actual autocracies, which happen all the time in history and across the world. Right? That’s all we know so far.

Applebaum: Yeah, that’s all we know. That’s all we know. We also don’t know whether Trump will do some of the things that he said he would do. I mean, he talked about mass firings of civil servants. He talked about having people around him who were loyalists. That’s what political scientists would describe as “capturing the state”—so taking over government departments, government institutions, putting them not in the service of the nation and of everybody but making part of your political machine, using them for your political purposes.

He talked about doing that. Will he try it again? Maybe, if he has a House and a Senate that will support him. As we’re speaking, we don’t know about the House, so we’ll see. They might make it easy. Will the judiciary support him? Some of it will. So will he do it? I don’t know.

General John Kelly, who was his former chief of staff, has said that last time Trump was president, he talked about: We should investigate or get the IRS on—at that time he was talking about the former FBI director, James Comey, or his deputy, Andrew McCabe. Maybe now he’s talked about punishing Adam Schiff—who’s a congressman, now a senator, who he doesn’t like—or Nancy Pelosi.

Will he do it? Will he use the IRS to go after people? I mean, that’s another thing that happens in failing democracies. And it’s also something that has happened in U.S. history before, so it’s not unimaginable.

So I don’t know whether he’ll do these things, but it’s now on the record that he has said he would, or he said he wants to. In some of the documents written by people around him, there have been plans to do that. That’s what Project 2025 was, in part. And none of it bothered people, and so we have to assume that it’s a possibility.

Coppins: I do think, to answer your earlier question, that it’s worth noting that, while a lot of voters went into the ballot box thinking about democracy—and in fact, according to one exit poll, around a third of voters said democracy was their top issue—a lot of voters were not thinking about these things, and they were not voting based on hoping that Donald Trump would weaponize the IRS against his political enemies. For example, a third of voters said the economy was their top concern. And I think when we talk about the shifts among those demographic groups, we have to acknowledge that a lot of it was a very simple response to groceries costing more, inflation being up, feeling like the economy was on the wrong track, and responding to a deeply unpopular incumbent president.

And while we can sit back and look at the broad scope of history, it is clear that not all voters who went in to vote in these last few weeks were thinking about democracy. But I think it’s also good to point that out because Donald Trump is going to claim a mandate, coming out of this election, and say: I swept the swing states. The voters want me to have all this power. He’ll implicitly say, They want me to abuse my power. They’ve given me permission to do whatever I want. And I think that it’s worth noting that for a whole lot of people who voted for him, they just wanted him to make groceries cost less.

Applebaum: Yeah, but that’s not really an excuse. I mean, you are, as a voter, obligated to know what the person you’re voting for stands for. And the responsibility of the president of the United States is not merely to control inflation. The president also has a lot of power over the U.S. government, over U.S. institutions, over American foreign policy, and by deciding you don’t care about those things, you do give him that mandate.

Coppins: But my concern is that there’s a risk of a kind of democratic fatalism coming out of this election, where we will decide that: Look—Americans voted for this aspiring autocrat, therefore he will be an autocrat, and democracy has failed.

And I think that it’s worth parsing this electoral data a little bit and acknowledging that a majority of Americans did not necessarily give him an autocratic mandate. Whether they were thinking about the things that they should have been thinking about, weighing the priorities the way that we think they should have been, I don’t think we should let—it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy if we let Trump and his allies claim that, because he’s said and done all these things and he won the election, he now has permission to do whatever he wants.

Rosin: Yeah. One way of seeing the vote is that it wasn’t at all a referendum on Trump. It was people saying: My life was better in 2019, so I’m going with Trump. And I think why what you’re saying is important, McKay, is because people who didn’t vote for Trump can get discouraged and overwhelmed and tell themselves, People who voted for him voted for everything he stands for. And what follows from that is a sense of alienation. Like, This is not my country, and I don’t understand what’s going on.

Anyway, Anne, you mentioned that Trump ran an explicitly vengeful campaign, that he would come after “enemies from within,” whether they were immigrants, Democrats, or us, the journalists. And you have taught us to take leaders’ words seriously. And yet a lot of people, not just voters, have said, Oh, this is hyperbole. Stop taking it so seriously. So how do we know the difference?

Applebaum: We’ll know by his actions. Maybe it’s true that by saying those things and by acting out vengeance, maybe that was appealing to people who want some kind of vengeance, who are angry at whatever—the economy or the system or the establishment or the media or Hollywood or the culture—whatever it is that they’re angry at or feel deprived by, that he acted that out for them, and that was appealing to them. I’m sure that’s a piece of the explanation.

And then another piece of the explanation is that there were people, like The Wall Street Journal editorial board or the writer Niall Ferguson, who said, Oh, these things just don’t matter. It’s just hyperbole. You know, That’s just how he talks. So we’ll see, and we’ll wait for it.

Rosin: McKay, Project 2025, which came up a lot in the campaign and has been described as a blueprint for the next administration, includes transformative ideas about everything from abortion to tax policy. How much do you think that’s a realistic roadmap for what the administration might do?

Coppins: I would take it seriously. I think that there is a risk that—because Donald Trump, realizing it was a political albatross around his neck, decided to distance himself in the final months of the campaign—that we collectively take him at his word, and I don’t think we should.

I think that what he ends up doing in his next term will rely a lot upon who he appoints to his administration. I reported, back in December, that, in talking to people in Trump world about future appointees, the watchword was obedience. They talked about how Trump felt burned in his first term by appointees, people in his cabinet who saw themselves as adults in the room, who believed that their role was to constrain him, to keep the train on the tracks. And he doesn’t want people like that in his next administration. He doesn’t want adults in the room. He doesn’t want James Mattises or Mark Milleys or John Kellys. He wants absolute loyalists, either people who share his ideological worldview or, out of a sense of ambition or cravenness, are willing to do exactly what he says without questioning it.

And so when you look at Project 2025 and the part of the plan, for example, that has to do with politicizing the civil service, taking 50,000 jobs in the federal bureaucracy and making them political appointees subject to the whims of the president, it will matter a lot whether he follows through on that and who those people are.

A big part of Project 2025 was identifying loyalists, partisans, conservatives who could fill those roles. And so I think, when we talk through his next administration, what his agenda will look like, a lot of it comes down to this kind of truism of Washington that personnel is policy. So does Stephen Miller return to his administration in some kind of role where he gets to oversee immigration enforcement? It’s entirely possible, but that will make a big difference in terms of how much he follows through on his threats of mass deportation.

Who does he appoint as attorney general? That was one role that everybody I talked to in Trump world told me he was very committed to getting right because he felt the two men who served in that role in his first term betrayed him. So is it somebody like Josh Hawley or Mike Lee or Ted Cruz? These are the questions that we’re going to have to be answering, and we’ll get a lot more clarity in the coming weeks and months as we see those appointees and those short lists emerge.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, we’re going to get into what mass deportations under Trump could look like.

[Break]

Rosin: Something else I’ve been thinking about a lot that Trump has threatened is mass deportations. They are expensive. They’re actually quite difficult to carry out. They require a lot of manpower, local and national. Is that bombast? Is that a realistic threat? How will we know the difference?

Coppins: Yeah. Again, this is where I think personnel will matter a lot, who is head of the Department of Homeland Security, for example. But just to go through what Trump promised on the campaign trail: He said that he would build massive detention camps, implement mass deportations at a scale never before seen in this country, hire thousands of additional border agents, use military spending on border security.

He even said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel people who were suspected of being in drug cartels or gangs, without a court hearing.

He said he would end “catch and release,” reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy. And I think it’s notable that he did not directly answer whether he would reinstate family separation, which was the most controversial aspect of his immigration policy in the first term.

Take all these together—I think there are some of these things he could do pretty easily on his own with executive orders, and there’s not a lot of evidence that he could be constrained by the courts or by Congress. There are some things, like building massive detention centers, that would require a lot of money. Hiring thousands of more border agents would require a lot of money. So this is where control of Congress is going to matter a lot.

Rosin: Are there others on his list that are top of mind for either of you? Aid to Ukraine is one that I’m thinking of. Are there others where you’re going to be vigilantly watching: Okay, he said X. Is he going to do X?

Applebaum: Aid to Ukraine is in a slightly different category. It’s not about American autocracy and democracy. It’s a question of our position in the world. Are we going to remain the leader of a democratic camp, which is opposing the growing and increasingly networked autocratic camp? Will we oppose Russia, which is now in alliance with Iran and North Korea and China? Or will we not?

And this, again, from Trump world, I know a lot of people who spent a lot of time in the run-up to the election trying to find out what Trump meant when he said, I’ll end the war in one day, which has been his standard response when asked about it. And you can literally find almost as many interpretations of that expression as there are people in Trump’s orbit.

I mean, it ranges from, We’re just going to cut off all the funding, to, We’re going to give Ukraine to the Russians, to something quite different. There are people who said: No. We’re going to threaten the Russians. We’re going to tell them we’re bringing in a thousand tanks and a thousand airplanes unless you pull back. And so that’s another version that I’ve heard. There are versions that suggest offering something to Russia—you know, some deal. But honestly, I don’t know.

Rosin: But those are legitimate foreign-policy debates. You can be an isolationist democracy. Those are not fundamental threats in your mind to the nature of this country and what it should be?

Applebaum: No, although there are connections and have always been—we haven’t always acknowledged them—between America’s alliances and America’s democracy. So the fact that we have been aligned in the past with a camp of other democracies, that we put democracy at the center of our foreign policy for such a long time during the Cold War, was one of the reasons why our democracy was strengthened.

It’s well known that during the Cold War, one of the reasons why there was an establishment shift towards favoring civil rights and the civil-rights movement was the feeling that: Here’s this thing we stand for. We stand for democracy. We stand for the rule of law, and yet we don’t have it in our own country. And there were a lot of people who felt that very strongly. And it’s not a bad reason why that happened, but it’s part of the explanation.

You know, Who are your allies? Who are your friends? This affects, also, what kind of country you are and your own behavior. Who are your relationships? You know, if our primary political and diplomatic and economic relationship is with Russia and North Korea, then we’re a different kind of country than if our primary relationship is with Britain and France.

Coppins: The only other kind of policy area that I’ll be keeping an eye on is tariffs. He has said that he would impose between 10 and 20 percent across-the-board tariffs on all U.S. imports and a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods.

A lot of economic experts pointed out that this would very likely cause massive inflation. And given that he was just elected, in large part, on voter frustration with inflation, it’s an open question whether he’ll follow through on this. He clearly does not believe—and this is one of the few issues that he’s been pretty consistent on his entire life—he does not believe it would cause inflation. Almost every economics expert disagrees with him.

And in his first term, there were people in the White House who blocked him from imposing more tariffs than he actually did, in fact to the point where we saw reporting from Bob Woodward that his staff secretary was literally taking executive orders off his desk before he could sign them and kind of losing them in the bureaucracy of paperwork. Will there be somebody like that this time? Will there be somebody who can get his ear and convince him not to go through with this? That is something that I think a lot of people will be looking at because the economic implications for this country and globally could be pretty profound.

Rosin: And what are the bigger implications of tariffs? Like, that could just be a legitimate economic debate. Some people believe in tariffs. Some people don’t believe in tariffs. And it’s an experiment and, you know, economic protectionism.

Coppins: I would not say that this is one of those kind of core democratic issues, that certainly, to various degrees, there have been protectionist policy makers and politicians in both parties over the last several decades. It could cause a trade war. It could interfere with our diplomatic relations with the countries that we’re imposing tariffs on. There are a lot of trickle-down implications.

But yes, I do think it’s important. And I like that what you’re doing here is separating the issues that are kind of more typical policy disagreements from those things that Anne has been talking about, which are fundamental to American democracy. I don’t think tariffs are, but they could have an effect on a lot of Americans, and so that’s why I think it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Rosin: Okay. There’s obviously going to be some resistance to Trump. Let’s start simple: McKay, who is going to be the leader of the Democratic Party?

Coppins: So, obviously, if Democrats take control of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, the next speaker, would, I think by default, become the kind of leader of the Democratic opposition to Trump, at least for a while.

If Democrats don’t take control of the House, I think it’s a very open question and, frankly, it’s one that Democrats probably should have been trying to answer two years ago. Joe Biden deciding to stay in the race after the 2022 midterms will probably go down as one of the most consequential political decisions in this era. The fact that he stayed in for so long, only to drop out in the final months of the election, meant that Democrats didn’t really have time to have the big intraparty debate about what they should stand for, who their standard-bearer should be.

That debate will be happening now. And it’s going to be contentious and noisy and unsettling to a lot of left-leaning voters. I also think it’s healthy to have these conversations. And I think Democrats, in some ways, are kind of innately averse to that kind of contention. And I think that they might need to kind of get comfortable with it, because one way to look at the two elections that Donald Trump has won is that he really benefited from the fact that Democrats cleared the field for the two nominees he ended up beating: Hillary Clinton in 2016, Kamala Harris in 2024.

One takeaway that I think a lot of Democrats will have is that Democrats need to decide that they’re okay with a little messiness in letting their voters decide who their nominee will be.

Rosin: Anne, when other countries have faced a moment like this—a moment when you have to be vigilant, things are in the balance, the opposition feels alienated, it’s unclear who the opposition leaders are at the moment—how do you move through a moment like that? Like, how have other countries successfully moved to a healthier place?

Applebaum: I mean, it almost entirely involves building broad coalitions. The only real example I can give: I live part of the time in Poland. We had an autocratic, populist government takeover in 2015. They did try to capture the state.

They did it pretty successfully. They took over state media, which is a big deal in Poland, and they made it into a kind of propaganda tube. Poland has some state companies, and they took over the companies and began using the money to fund themselves and their party and so on. They enriched themselves, and they tried to create a system whereby they would never lose again.

Remember that another sign of autocracy and a very, very important thing to watch for is corruption. Because when you remove guardrails and when you remove inspectors general and when you weaken the media, then it becomes much easier for people to be corrupt. And we’ve already got that problem in our system, and it’s going to get a lot worse.

Essentially, what happened was the building of a coalition that went, in their case, from the center-left to the center-right—kind of center-left liberal, center-right—of people who wanted something. It was, in part, an anti-corruption coalition, so it wasn’t so much built around fighting for democracy, although that was a piece of it.

The coalition was also seeking to fight against corruption and for good government. But it took eight years. It was a long process. And along the way, a lot of money was stolen. And the institutions declined, and the country is worse governed, and there are a lot of problems that are not going to be easy to solve.

But there’s a look for coalitions. There was some internal soul-searching about what it was we did that—Why did we lose? But I’m not sure even how useful all of that was. I mean, what mattered, in the end, was the reconstruction of an opposition that had a clear message, that had a clear critique, and offered a vision of a different kind of future that was led by somebody who was charismatic.

Rosin: Yeah. That is actually really useful, even to know that the coalitions don’t have to be for the restoration of democracy. They can be against mass deportation, against tariffs. Like, you can form coalitions, if you tell yourself, No, the voters did not give a mandate to Donald Trump to do whatever he wants and carry out all of his policies. That is not what happened in the last election, coalitions can form—popular coalitions—around all kinds of issues.

Applebaum: Yeah. I mean, you could have a coalition that really cares about women’s issues and women’s rights and abortion rights. And you can have another one that really cares about the environment. And you can have another one that really cares about corruption. And you link them together, and then you have a movement.

Rosin: Right.

Applebaum: And that’s sometimes more effective. I mean, democracy is an abstract word that doesn’t necessarily mean things to people. It has to be made real through something that people experience. And maybe that’s how we have to look at it too.

Rosin: Yeah. I think the thing that catches me in this election, which we haven’t quite touched on, is the truth-and-lies problem. I find that so overwhelming, like, the idea that people believe an untrue thing about what happened on January 6 and an untrue thing about what happened at Springfield, Ohio. And, as a journalist, I always find that an impossible barrier to cross. But maybe you’re suggesting ways to cross that barrier is: Well, people believe smaller truths.

Applebaum: It’s one of the ways. We now have an information system that enables the creation of alternate realities. For me, one of the really striking things about the election campaign wasn’t so much Trump. It was Musk. Elon Musk, who owns a big and important social-media platform, was saying things that he must have known not to be true: falsehoods about immigration, about the election.

He was allowing the platform to deliberately promote them. And he seemed to be doing that as a way of demonstrating his power. He was showing us that he can decide what people think. And he was working hard to create this alternate world in which things that aren’t true seem true. And that—I’m afraid it was really successful.

Rosin: Right.

Coppins: And the other thing that I think we’ve seen is that a big purpose of propaganda and disinformation is not even just to convince people that a certain thing is true but to almost exhaust their ability to tell the difference between what’s true and what’s not, and make them cynical and fatigued and disinclined to even try.

I remember in 2020, I spent a lot of time covering disinformation in the campaign. And that was the thing that I would encounter when I talked to Trump voters. It wasn’t so much that they believed everything he said. Some would even acknowledge that he would lie or exaggerate. But they would throw their hands up and say: Yeah, they all lie, right? Who even knows what’s true? And that, I think, is the thing that we need to guard against over these next few years.

Applebaum: That is the essence of Putinist propaganda. It’s not so much that you’re expected to believe everything he says about whatever, the greatness of Russia or the horror of Western civilization. But you’re expected to become so confused by the multitude and number of lies that you’ve been told that you throw your hands up in the air, and you go home, and you say, I don’t know anything. I can’t be involved in this. I don’t want anything to do with politics. I’m just going to live my life.

And that turns out to be a really, really successful form of propaganda, probably more successful than the old-fashioned Soviet thing of telling everybody that everything is great, which you can disprove pretty easily.

Rosin: Well, Anne and McKay, with your idea of coalitions, I had almost succeeded in finding us a practical path of thinking about a future. But now we’re back at this big veil of disinformation, which is not the place I want to end. Is there some way to turn that ship?

I’ll ask you again, Anne: How have people turned that ship when you find a culture, a populace that’s just become cynical and overwhelmed by lies? How have other countries successfully crawled out of that disinformation?

Applebaum: You build relationships of trust around other things. I mean, almost as we were just talking about, you find alternative forms of communication, all different ways of reaching people. That’s the only way.

Rosin: All right. Well, Anne, McKay, we will have many more such conversations, but thank you for helping us be more discerning.

Coppins: Thank you.

Applebaum: Thanks.

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Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.