Excitement, self-deception, and retraction

Yesterday, Davide Castelvecchi reported in Nature on the retraction of a 2018 paper claiming detection of a signature suggesting the existence of a Majorana fermion state.  It's a good article, and includes a link to the report of an independent investigation which concluded that, while no fraud had occurred, the authors of the paper essentially fooled themselves, implying that they fooled everyone else too, by publishing.  There are a couple excerpts from the report (by "experts" P. Brouwer, K. Ensslin, D. Goldhaber-Gordon, and P. Lee) that are worthy of reading here.

First, from Section 3:

And finally, from the Conclusion:

It should be noted that the expert investigators were provided with unpublished data, available to the authors before they published, that would have cast doubt on the original authors' conclusions, and that even the published data had features that a sharp reader could have used to cast such doubt.