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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."
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.
Your comment betrays you. Why on earth do you think that psychology does not involve controlled and reproducible experiments? Why do you think it is based on post-hoc reasoning? Like I said, you need to merely look into psychological research to see your error.
There's a tremendous amount of reproducible, controlled experiments in psychology. One area that in the last thirty years has been particularly successful is in quantifying and detecting cognitive biases. There have been very careful, clever experiments documenting the conjunction fallacy and when humans do it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy, the framing effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology), confirmation bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias, and many more. Moreover, there are now being developed general theories that explain what sorts of errors in reasoning humans will make, and those theories are often falsifiable. Psychology does have problems and especially had problems historically. It probably has one of the worst signal to crap rates of any of the soft sciences, but that doesn't make it a science and doesn't mean people aren't doing very good work in it.