Report: Dutch 'Lord of the Data' Forged Dozens of Studies (UPDATE)

One of the Netherlands' leading social psychologists made up or manipulated data in dozens of papers over nearly a decade, an investigating committee has concluded.

Diederik Stapel was suspended from his position at Tilburg University in the Netherlands in September after three junior researchers reported that they suspected scientific misconduct in his work. Soon after being confronted with the accusations, Stapel reportedly told university officials that some of his papers contained falsified data. The university launched an investigation, as did the University of Groningen and the University of Amsterdam, where Stapel had worked previously. The Tilburg commission today released an interim report (in Dutch), which includes preliminary results from all three investigations. The investigators found "several dozens of publications" in which fictitious data has been used. Fourteen of the 21 Ph.D. theses Stapel supervised are also tainted, the committee concluded.

Stapel issued a statement today in which he apologizes to his colleagues and says he "failed as a scientist" and is ashamed of his actions. He has cooperated to an extent by identifying papers with suspect data, according to university officials. The investigation by the three universities is ongoing and should ultimately investigate more than 150 papers that Stapel has co-authored, including a paper published earlier this year in Science on the influence of a messy environment on prejudice. "People are in shock," says Gerben van Kleef, a social psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, who did not work directly with Stapel. "Everybody wonders how this could have happened and at this proportion."

Stapel's work encompassed a broad range of attention-catching topics, including the influence of power on moral thinking and the reaction of psychologists to a plagiarism scandal. The committee, which interviewed dozens of Stapel's former students, postdoctoral researchers, co-authors, and colleagues, found that Stapel alone was responsible for the fraud. The panel reported that he 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. In other instances, the report says, he told colleagues that he had an old data set lying around that he hadn't yet had a chance to analyze. When Stapel did conduct actual experiments, the committee found evidence that he manipulated the results.

Many of Stapel's students graduated without having ever run an experiment, the report says. Stapel told them that their time was better spent analyzing data and writing. The commission writes that Stapel was "lord of the data" in his collaborations. It says colleagues or students who asked to see raw data were given excuses or even threatened and insulted.

At least two earlier groups of whistleblowers had raised questions about Stapel's work, the commission found. No one followed up on their concerns, however. Stapel's fabrications weren't particularly sophisticated, the committee says, and on careful inspection many of the data sets have improbable effect sizes and other statistical irregularities. His colleagues, when they failed to replicate the results, tended to blame themselves, the report says. Among Stapel's colleagues, the description of data as too good to be true "was a heartfelt compliment to his skill and creativity," the report says.

The report recommends that the universities of Groningen and Tilburg look into whether criminal charges are appropriate based on the misuse of research funds and possible harm to Stapel's students resulting from the fraud. The University of Amsterdam, where Stapel did his Ph.D., has apparently not been able to determine whether his thesis was fraudulent or not, in part because some of the original data records were destroyed. The committee suggests that the university consider revoking Stapel's degree, however, based on conduct that is "unbecoming" to the degree holder. (The University of Konstanz in Germany revoked disgraced physicist Jan Hendrik Schön's Ph.D. for that reason.)

UPDATE: The Dutch report noted in the article has now been released in an official English version. The report says that Diederik Stapel voluntarily identified a list of journal articles he authored or co-authored that were "based on fabricated data" but that list is not in the report and has not yet been made public.

Correction: This item has been changed to remove an inaccurate identification of what the whistle-blowers reported to university officials. It also notes that the committees will be investigating all of Stapel's publications, not just those since 2004.

The panel reported that he 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.

I wonder how much leftist social dogma was created this way, with phoney "social science" studies?

Thomas Sowell has an interesting take on that:
My late mentor, Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler, used to say that it could be very instructive to spend a few hours in a library checking up on studies that had been cited. When I began doing that, I found it not only instructive but disillusioning. A footnote in a textbook on labor economics cited six studies to back up a conclusion it reached. But, after I went to the library and looked at those six studies, it turned out that they each cited some other study -- the same other study in all six cases. Now that the six studies had shrunk to one, I got that one study -- and found that it was a study of a very different situation from the one discussed in the labor economics textbook. . . . Once a minister was explaining to me the structure of his funeral orations. He said, "At this point, you are expected to say something good about the deceased. Now, Tom, if I were preaching your funeral, what would I say good about you at that point?" He thought and thought -- for an embarrassingly long time. Finally, he said gravely: "In his research, he always used original sources." I'll take that.
"Studies Prove": Part II (Thomas Sowell)
If I'm still Freeping when the Lord calls Thomas Sowell home, I intend to repost that article for him then.

Criminal charges are needed. These ‘white collar’ crimes cause much more harm than people realize.

Obama likes to talk about the "cost" to society of things like tax cuts and "aging infrastructure". He uses fraudulent science to push leftist agendas like anti-CO2/oil/coal and anti-nuke energy policies.....

.....How about a cost analysis of the cost to society of fraudulent science?

.....How about sending fraudulent scientists to jail for economic harm to society?

.....How about fining companies and Universities that produce these fraudulent "scientific" studies for the economic harm they cause?

I think this article exposes the tip of the iceberg.

"Scientists" have been getting a free pass because they are supposed to be "so much smarter" than the rest of us.

This same standard is applied to leftists like Obama. How many times have we heard how overly smart he is and that our disagreements with his policies are the true result of how stupid we are compared to him?

Scientists pass these fraudulent "studies" on as gospel with a wink and a nudge. They become cited in other studies. In a short time, a fraud has become embedded in the "body of truth" that shapes our society through Medicine, Engineering, and Law.

We are all paying a great price for this leftist infiltration of truth.

SO TRUE!!

I didn’t go back that far because the Kinsey/Hefner mindset did not become the majority until1980’s (when Bloom wrote his book, “The Closing of the American Mind.) It took awhile to kick out the Classics and insert cr*p into all the schools and took jimmy awhile to establish Central Control of Education so they could completely brainwash every kid which sick perverted ideas.

It took awhile for the Foundations and Universities to push out the Classics and insert The Beats (”hanging boys with erections and sodomizing them” Naked Lunch type crap) They removed the study of Cato and Cicero for the study of homosexuals and their pornography (Ginsberg). Put it into minds by the 70’s and then by the time these sick, perverted people got total control of the culture—media, magazines, schools-—they infused their sick ideas into all.

So, even though the cultural Marxists started their takeover in the 1920’s, it didn’t become dominant until they had central control over all minds and took over the educational establishment for brainwashing and the media for corrupting the young and preventing the learning of true knowledge and Wisdom

They kicked out intellectual pursuit and replaced it with emotional debauchery.

Well put, with good analysis and history. In 1991, 300 million communists didn't suddenly convert to free-market capitalists. They entered, and have destroyed, all our institutions--the Church, the schools, the government, the environmental movement.

You can't pay me enough to attend church anymore--and I was organist for 3 services a week for over 20 years.

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