And since the post says "the fourth author has made it clear to us that he was the only author in touch with the insurance company", it seems clear that Ariely personally fabricated the data.
It's obvious that Ariely is dirty, and I'd bet we'll hear of other similar cases soon enough from other studies that he was involved in. Cheaters don't cheat just once.
>And this is not the first time questions have been raised about Ariely’s research in particular. In a famous 2008 study, he claimed that prompting people to recall the Ten Commandments before a test cuts down on cheating, but an outside team later failed to replicate the effect. An editor’s note was added to a 2004 study of his last month when other researchers raised concerns about statistical discrepancies, and Ariely did not have the original data to cross-check against. And in 2010, Ariely told NPR that dentists often disagree on whether X-rays show a cavity, citing Delta Dental insurance as his source. He later walked back that claim when the company said it could not have shared that information with him because it did not collect it.
from "Dan Ariely was suspended from research at MIT after conducting unauthorized experiment with human subjects" ^
>We talked to sources at MIT, who said that the way in which the placebo experiment was conducted led to dispute and eventually to Ariely's departure. Sources familiar with the study said that Ariely did not request the necessary permissions from the IRB (Institutional Review Board) of MIT that is called CUEHUS, and did not fulfill the required protocols to conduct the experiment, which included administration of electric shocks to 80 participants, and administration of cheaper or more expensive placebo medications.
>When this was discovered after one of the participants complained, the ethics committee reached out to Ariely for an explanation. Emails that have come to our attention reveal that Ariely's reply was amused in tone, indicating he had a general protocol for this type of experiment of this type called "electric shocks", and he followed them.
^ https://www.ha-makom.co.il/post-tomer-dan-ariely-mit-suspent...
EDIT: And to the point of not being able to fake that data well. Yeah, again, if we are in the business of getting credit points quickly, faking the data quickly makes sense too. No one would take a close look, right?