Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
Guessing he's a vegan with an agenda. Probably make a good study case for a paper on meatless diets increasing bad decision making.
I mean really, they already made the huge mistake of giving up tasty animal flesh, someone should study what other bad decisions vegans make.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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."
No wonder people were suspicious. I don't know anyone who became anto-social after eating meat.
Perhaps it embiggened some gland which released some hormone into the blood. It's a perfectly cromulent theory.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Guessing he's a vegan with an agenda. Probably make a good study case for a paper on meatless diets increasing bad decision making.
I mean really, they already made the huge mistake of giving up tasty animal flesh, someone should study what other bad decisions vegans make.
Well, eating too much meat can constipate you. Then you go off to the john and spend a lot of time in there, which makes people think you don't want to spend time with them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Among other peculiarities, his research results made sense.
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.
Clearly, Slashdot must be working on some psychological study on the psychological effects of spelling, grammar and punctuation errors on members a tech-oriented website community. Unfortunately, it seems that the researcher for this Slashdot study was not the one in the summary, so these grammar mistakes will still happen until we find the researcher and convince him to finish his study already.
> Diederik Stapel's latest paper claimed that eating meat made people anto-social and selfish.
And eating shellfish makes you ...
Observations done on apes ( specially on chimps) showed extra cooperation and leveling of the hierarchical order when the animals were hunting/eating meat. If anything meat should make you more sociable. Seeing how much we resemble them, I would be sceptical about these results as well.
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...
Guessing he's a vegan with an agenda. Probably make a good study case for a paper on meatless diets increasing bad decision making.
I mean really, they already made the huge mistake of giving up tasty animal flesh, someone should study what other bad decisions vegans make.
Hey, let them eat grass and hug trees. We don't want to cause a meat shortage, do we?
And eating lots of greens causes buildup of gas, something that might impact on your social skills!
Well, eating too much protein can constipate you.
FTFY
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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.
Yes we have all these social events centered around eating meat.
BBQ, Hawian Luau, Thanks Giving... Meat is something we like to eat and share with others.
If eating meat was anti-social then these traditions probably wouldn't last threw the generations.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Then they told the boss of Stapel their findings.
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
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.
Guessing he's a scientist with a desire to be funded but stymied by a lack of fruitful research.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
What ever are you talking about? Give me a plate of bacon or USDA Prime filet mignon cooked rare and see how social I become.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
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."
Well if someone is just giving me bacon and filets, I'm gunna be their new best friend.
That might be different if there weren't so many blowhard vegetarians screaming murder. I mean the ones in Bikini's (or less) are cute. The rest are not.
Well I don't know about after, because usually i'm more sleepy and happy than cranky, but I know if some green eater tried to grab my BBQ sammich there ass will be drawing back a stump! They got one of them little family owned BBQ stands down the street, where they slow cook that meat until it melts in your mouth, just a hint of sauce too, they don't drown it like those places that use cheap meat....mmmmm... dammit now I'm gonna have to go get me a sammich!
As for TFA frankly I figured most of the vegans were batshit after PETA tried to have fish labeled "sea kittens' to make people not eat them. you think I'm bullshitting? look it up, I swear to God, they want to relabel Tuna and trout and all other fish as "sea kittens" because they think folks won't eat a sea kitten sandwich!
Personally I say if you don't want to eat me for personal reasons that's your business, I don't dig swine myself but that's just cause i was raised on a farm and I know what filthy little scavengers they are, but don't be trying to make us switch to your beliefs, okay? I would never tell someone they couldn't have that pork chop, I just don't like it for myself.
I miss the days when we actually had personal responsibility and people left each other the fuck alone. If I wanna smoke, or have a beer, or eat some tasty BBQ, what business is it of yours? Oh and before someone chimes in with "medical costs" let me say this: I'll be MORE than happy to sign an ironclad waiver that says if I get cancer the ONLY thing I'll be given if morphine which is dirt cheap, and in return you quit taxing the fuck out of me, do we have a deal? I've actually put that offer to politicians and they hem and haw but it comes down to THEY want the money for THEIR pet projects and what THEY think is best for YOU.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That's not true. Daniel Kahneman got the Nobel Prize in economics for his work with Tversky on behavioral economics.
And eating lots of greens causes buildup of gas, something that might impact on your social skills!
Let's not forget that methane is a greenhouse gas, so this is clearly putting us all at risk.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
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-
Actually it's funny that the anti meat people always bring up cows as the big methane producers as a threat to the environment, like 7 billion people didn't produce any methane...
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.
There is an informative write-up at scientific american . It says that three researchers who worked under his supervision found irregularities in published data and then notified the head of department.
Guessing he's a vegan with an agenda. Probably make a good study case for a paper on meatless diets increasing bad decision making.
I mean really, they already made the huge mistake of giving up tasty animal flesh, someone should study what other bad decisions vegans make.
Well, eating too much meat can constipate you. Then you go off to the john and spend a lot of time in there, which makes people think you don't want to spend time with them.
Similarly, eating too much fiber (aka - fruit) can give you a bad case of the runs, and the end result is the same.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Of course it is, don't be daft.
Science is the study of nature.
People's behaviors is part of nature
Psychology is studying behavior
Psychology is science.
A difficult one, and one that got started by someone who turned out to be wrong about his conclusions, but it is stuill a science.
Magician really heavily on psychology, as do con men, advertisers, and you mother.
SO, yes it's a science.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ever ate a pound of prunes?
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).
"It's funny that the anti-X people acknowledge that X produces unwanted effect Y. Why don't they call for every possible source of Y to be eliminated?" Because that would be absurd, and sometimes you have to pick your battles, and the battle they've chosen is meat, not methane.
Never mind that a lot of anti-meat people would also be perfectly happy with overall human population reduction as well.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
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.
"Science" has NEVER been the pure and incorruptible ideal it's often represented tot he public as. So far as how most non-scientists perceive technology and "science", one could legitimately argue that they are, to the general public, not much different than religion.
Well, if he was a vegan with an agenda, it's obvious that NOT eating meat can seriously harm your judgement. Just look at the loons in PETA...
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Pro-meat people would also be happy with overall human population reduction too. More meat for them.
Life. Is. Good.
Not while eating them, just before and probably after--since you're hoping for more...
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
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