Social Psychologist Fabricates Data

A committee at Tilburg University (in the Netherlands) has determined that the social psychologist Diederik Stapel is guilty of fabricating data in multiple studies. Staepl has admitted his guilt, saying he "failed as a scientist". From sciencemag.org:

The panel reported that [Stapel] would discuss in detail experimental designs, including drafting questionnaires, and would then claim to conduct the experiments at high schools and universities with which he had special arrangements. The experiments, however, never took place, the universities concluded. Stapel made up the data sets, which he then gave the student or collaborator for analysis, investigators allege.

An odd touch of irony: Some of Stapel's earlier work included investigating how psychologists would react to a plagiarism scandal.

Science

Posted on Tue Nov 01, 2011


Comments

Stapel got into the news a lot with quirky studies. Amongst others, just two months before his denouement he was in the news with a study purporting to show that meat-eating people are more anti-social than vegetarians. Turns out the data were fabricated.
Posted by LaMa  on  Wed Nov 02, 2011  at  03:14 AM
I'll bet the 'activist' type of vegans won't accept that he falsified his data. Confirms too much of what they believe and all.

*sigh* It's the 'publish or perish' thing.. so much pressure to get your name out on in the scientific community, that it's cause for folks to start making stuff up.

If he'd been SMART, he'd have falsified data that was *boring*. Take the meat/veggie study. If he had instead published findings that showed that there was 'no noticable correlation between meat consumption and socialization', then everyone would have shrugged and not looked at it closely.
Posted by Robin Bobcat  on  Wed Nov 02, 2011  at  06:16 PM
When the news emerged a few weeks ago, some people thought that this was a hoax made up by Stapel so he could use the reaction from the media to his plagiarism in his research paper.

Unfortunately for the university and for him, it wasn't.

Idiot.
Posted by ChrisCarpenter  on  Fri Nov 04, 2011  at  09:17 AM
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