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Dutch Psychologist Faked Data In At Least 30 Scientific Papers
Attila Dimedici writes "A professor at Tilburg University has been caught using fake data in over 30 scientific papers. Diederik Stapel's latest paper claimed that eating meat made people anti-social and selfish. Other academics were skeptical of his findings and raised doubts about his research. Upon investigation it was discovered that he had invented the data he used in many of his papers and there is a question as to whether or not he used faked data in all of his published work."
No wonder people were suspicious. I don't know anyone who became anto-social after eating meat.
Yep none of his data can be trusted now. What a shame.
Why would all those other scientists do something that would threaten their grant money, when they could instead expand on his bullshit studies for pay? Anthony Watts, please explain!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If we look to the teachings of Freud he did all this to bone his mother. Clearly.
and would suggest that there is a 67.5% chance that the numbers he cites are unsupported.
Obligatory link to Plastic Fantastic.
The Reuters article doesn't say how he was caught. Does anybody know?
Anto-socialism = Wherein ants rule the world.
Hebrews 11:8
Jeremiah 33:3
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but really? anto-social? Could you at least run the submissions through a spell check?
I think the worst thing about this is that he was published in Science. Obviously the researcher's career ends here, but this is a big black mark on the journal as well.
Maybe if he hadn't eaten meat, he wouldn't have been so selfish as to fake data.
My company home page
Sounds like it was all just one big meta-study--now that he's got thirty fake papers to use as data he can write a paper on the psychological factors involved in publishing fake papers. Could be an interesting treatise on the nature of trust, the peer review process, ulterior motives and such, but it's too bad because everyone would dismiss it as fake.
Obligatory reference to the Sokal Affair.
The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax,[1] was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the publication's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to learn if such a journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
- There is no paper, only a press release.
- That press release was related to research by Roos Vonk, not Diederik Stapel (although she did use his made-up data).
- Said research claimed correlation, not causation.
I can see how this came from the 'if-it[sic]-first-you-don't-succeed-make-it-up' dept...
Even philosophers have been citing this work (eg Jesse Prinz), this is fracking huge. Somehow big journals need to start publishing replications of published work electronically and linking the original (in electronic form) to the attempted replications - and end the "We're too important to publish replications" nonsense. Peer review can only spot bad methods, and citations only really track relevance to what the citee is doing, There needs to be a quick an easy way to track replication - rather than trawling through minor journals that might have published a replication attempt. The topics of these papers were really important and the guy has single handedly fucked over sociology just when it really needs funding and support.
IANAP, but my off the cuff thinking tells me that eating berries makes one selfish and antisocial. Spend a lot of time off on your own, picking berries, "two for me, one for the group, two for me, one for the group", whereas hunting is oft times a social experience, and the sharing of the kill is a party-level event.
They aren't scientific papers to start with, so what difference does it make...
> Diederik Stapel's latest paper claimed that eating meat made people anto-social and selfish.
And eating shellfish makes you ...
Another fake science, to take away more Constitutional rights.
Every time a story appears that involves psychological research, numerous people make comments about how psychology is a sham, not a science, fluffy, or some other degrading adjective. I usually find that these people haven't the foggiest idea what psychology actually is. I'm willing to bet that many people here that are claiming psychology as a non-science are thinking about what is actually therapy or counseling. I suggest any doubters read actual psychology journals before they make such claims. Much of the advancement in our understanding of neurophysiology, sensory systems, cognitive processing, decision-making, social behavior, and human development is due to research conducted under the umbrella of psychology. The problem is that the public isn't aware of psychology's breadth.
You would think a psychologist would know better.
duck my sick
I'm not sure that is what he had in mind when he said "eating meat". Then again, he is Dutch...
Stapel: "Uhhhmm lets see... Facts?... Fiction?......Same thing!"
"It has long been known that acute marijuana administration impairs working memory" Study on usage of weed and Forgetting
this news story is okay, but could use a bit more irony. Like, if all of his papers had been on scientific dishonesty or the prevalence of fraudulent data.
Its rather stunning. They have a special section at the beginning of their letters section with the bold title "Retraction". Something almost every week now.
To be fair, most of those authors are not intentionally deception like this guy. But the system encourages rushing sensational results into print (like arsenic-based life) before they can be verified elsewhere. "Nobel prize or bust!" P.S. This result has not been retracted, although many have asked for that.
There are many reason why it is not considered a "real" science. nuff said.
Faked data like this or studies/data that are suppressed by the legions of lawyers at Monsanto and Pfizer. One is simply fabricated, the other is more boot-to-the-neck.
His accusation is silly.. now get the hell away from my steak, it's mine!! MINE!
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Mister (says a cowboy to a vegan across and Old West saloon counter), I said, can I buy you a chicken leg!
Political fraud is worse, it kills millions.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
What about other papers that reference this one? We wouldn't exactly want to cascade delete, because the dependency might not be complete, but a system for reviewing all of the referring papers would be nice.
-Dave
He's genealogically forced to cut corners that would save him money.
I hope equal prison.
Psychologists do not get Nobel Prizes. Ever. Too bad really, because there is some really stunning work out there.
Read and return:
A. A. Derksen (1993). The Seven Sins of Pseudo-Science. Journal for General Philosophy of Science 24 (1):17 - 42. "In this paper I will argue that a profile of the pseudo-sciences can be gained from the scientific pretensions of the pseudo-scientist. These pretensions provide two yardsticks which together take care of the charge of scientific prejudice that any suggested demarcation of pseudo-science has to face. To demonstrate that my analysis has teeth I will apply it to Freud and modern-day Bach-kabbalists. Against Laudan I will argue that the problem of demarcation is not a pseudo-problem, though the discussion will bear out that Laudan's replacement question, namely the question whether someone's theory is well-confirmed, is not, as Lugg claimed, independent of the question as to whether that person is a pseudo-scientist. I further argue that my prototype pseudo-scientists do not have the shortcomings highlighted in Thagard's recent analysis of pseudo-science"
It is quite fun, and shows that parts of the foundations of some psychology is a sham, not a science, that it is fluffy, or some other degrading adjective. The umbrella of psychology should not shelter those parts.
Done that. A lot of statistical fluff without any attempt at discovering the actual mechanism. Things have been slowly changing lately but due to mostly outside influences (MRI studies of the brain and such). It CAN be a science but the culture of psychology research as it exists now is far below any standards of rigor.
Wasn't there a Dilbert where he tells the PHB that studies show that people accept faked data as readily as real data.
PHB: How many studies?
Dilbert: 87.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's not true. Daniel Kahneman got the Nobel Prize in economics for his work with Tversky on behavioral economics.
Well, I guess this proves there's no such thing as global warming. http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-26-2011/weathering-fights---science---what-s-it-up-to-
Winning Nobel prizes generally requires more than one paper, or, if they only take one paper, they take years of confirmation and important effects due to that paper.
But journals, which are a profit center, don't seem to mind publishing junk any more.
He can always recycle as a politician.
Yeah, we duck your sick(ness) by modding you to oblivion. Sometimes I wish there was a rule on /. that if you get enough troll mods (like 10) that your post is deleted and everyone who downmodded you gets their points back. I'm sad I wasted this much time responding to your sick(ness).
Politics has severely tainted scientific publishing for decades.
Even Nobel prize winning scientists have had their funding removed and publishers refuse their papers for anything that doesn't pander to the dominate political ideology.
But every clown that mindlessly parrots politically popular propaganda can slide by for decades and even when exposed are never prosecuted for fraud.
Science should be about truth, not what is politically popular.
Studies in this field are really difficult to do. A rigorously defensible experimental regime is nearly impossible to establish. Inferences made from Factor Analysis and Correlation matrices are nearly shaky as Ouija boards and Yarrow sticks. Low numbers of casual observations made from a preselected class of people does not constitute good random sampling. The best conclusions in the field would barely serve as hypotheses in a true science. The "softer" sciences are extremely difficult to work with.
Keep Doing Good.
dead MEAT http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2009/11/why-the-fda-shouldnt-back-down-on-shellfish/
So based upon this fakery, it would seem that vegans are dishonest and self-righteous?
peer review? Do they still do such a thing or has science turned into one great big research grant grab. Look past the money.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine