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. His investigation ultimately led Erasmus University Rotterdam to lead its own investigation, which led to Smeester's resignation. 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.
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. His simulations have shown that changes in a few data-analysis decisions can increase the false-positive rate in a single study to 60%.
He is author of the blog Data Colada.