My belief in the integrity of psychological science is in a dither. How unsettling it is to read so much lately about fraud, fabrication, and plagiarism conducted by prominent researchers. Ironically, a well-respected popular science writer who wrote a
thoughtful article about the increasing difficulty of replicating
effects and the declining strength of replicated findings has himself been successfully challenged for plagiarism.
One result of these egregious violations of academic integrity has been the development of a number of tools and efforts to identify the likelihood of fraudulent data and its prevalance. Major empirical efforts such as the reproducibility project are underway to attempt to replicate findings published in prominent psychology journals within the past few years. The two major American professional psychology organizations, the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science have offered suggestions about how best to put these malfeasances in context and proposed ways of reducing the likelihood of fraud.
It has NOW been over year since the data fabrication of the renowned Dutch experimental social psychologist Diederik Stapel formerly at Tilburg University was formally exposed. Many of his widely cited articles have been formally retracted. The American Psychological Association has attempted to summarize the facts of the case, which has received extensive and often thoughtful consideration Inside Higher Education, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New York Times.
As a constructive attempt to use these events as a teaching moment, I shared with my students information about the Stapel controversy and asked them to share their responses in this forum. I invite you also to share any responses you have to the information above or to their thoughts since some of these students will become researchers in the near future.
After hearing about the Stapel Incident I was completely shocked. I had never expected for such an accomplished social psychologist be associated with fraudulent data. It still baffles me that an individual with such great intellectual talent found find it necessary you to create false data. My overall thinking is that you would think that it would be easier and more convenient to just traditionally collect the data instead of spending the time and mind power to create the date yourself. With that mentioned I would love to know what Staples motives were to conduct such horrific fraud. Another aspect to this incident that is extremely troubling to me is the fact that he was mentoring a group of doctorate students at this time. I can’t imagine know shocking and disappointing it would be to find out that your mentor was involved with a situation like this and how dishearten I would feel. With all of the above said, I truly believe that Stapel got to wrapped up in the attention and frame of the research world and that is what led him create fraudulent date. Another thing to remember is that it’s not like he just falsified one publication or finding, it was several which is what makes this even harder to grasp. The idea that this man was creating falsified data and also had a plethora of publications that were indeed also false and no one body realized it is another major concern to me. Overall, I believe that this incident has affected everyone in the psychology field due to the fact that from this time forward it will be much more difficult to have research findings recognized and published.
It really saddens me to see such talent be thrown away over fraud. When I was reading “Coping with Chaos: How Disordered Contexts Promote Stereotyping and Discrimination”, the only thing I kept thinking about was how people thought this was such groundbreaking research. I was genuinely shocked that is study was a fraud. The hypothesis, the data, and the writing all created this perfect study that had very interesting findings. The study was very practical and the writing was pure genius. His writing was captivating and a pleasure to read. People rely on this type of research. Being a prominent social psychologist, I’m really shocked that it took this long to figure out that he was faking these studies. Like Dr. Simpson said in class, he was powerful at Tilburg University and I could see how it would be hard to challenge authority like that. What bothers me the most was that this wasn’t ONE STUDY. The Committee that dealt with his case of fraud claimed that he had SEVERAL fraudulent publications. We know that he the fraud persisted since 2004 and no one stepped forward and said something until 2011. Seven years went by as the world of social psychology applauded Stapel for his work. My hat goes off to the three whistle blowers who said something. Like the interim report said, the integrity of science has definitely taken a blow from this. Tilburg University’s reputation has been damaged and they lost funding for this incident. I can’t imagine what it feels like to be a PhD student who studied under Stapel. I hope he feels genuine shame for what he did. I wonder what the results of his studies would have looked like if the data wasn’t fraudulent. I strongly believe that Diedrick Stapel is the cautionary whale for psychologists and hope that we all can learn from this incident and realize why our data is so important. People rely on these findings, simple as that. I’d also be very curious to know what he doing now.
Psychology is a fairly new science in the grand scheme of things. It has only been around since about 1879 with Wilhelm Wundt’s lab. Since that time it has strived to get and maintain credibility. It has now widely become accepted as a valid field, but every frauded experiment hurts it. What Diedrik Stapel did about a year ago has not only hurt his reputation, and the reputation of Tillburg University. It has hurt the credibility of psychology and the future’s of aspiring psychologists everywhere. So much more care will have to be taken in regards to every submission to every major publication of psychology. It will be more difficult than ever to for up and coming researchers to get their work out into the world.
When a prominent social psychologist admits to massive fraud, the repercussions will very likely be felt by others in the field for quite some time. Diederik Stapel seemed to almost be a “rock star” in the social psychology field. His actions were very likely influenced by his need for power, fame, prestige, and attention. Hopefully the incident will bring forth a call for greater regulation and positive changes in the future. Data manipulation is certainly not limited to social psychology. How many times do we not see or hear advertisements with the words “A new study finds…” or “Research suggests…” or “Experts say…”. We are all too quick to take things at face value and too slow to engage in critical examination. Not only do we have to contend with claims based on no evidence at all, but we also have to look very closely at what appears at first to be good, solid evidence. There’s a chance the data might be made up and fraudulent. Another example is a 1998 British study that was published in a medical journal linking autism to childhood vaccines. Dr. Andrew Wakefield misrepresented or altered the medical histories of children in the study and the data was declared a hoax in 2011. As a result, many parents panicked and this led to a sharp drop in children getting the vaccines that prevented childhood diseases. These examples show that research studies can have a big influence on a lot of people and influence both opinions and behavior. Hopefully, the statistical tools which are being developed, such as the reproducibility project, will be made available to the publishers of major scientific journals so that manipulation and fakery can be spotted before publication.
After hearing about Diederik Stapel, and the fraud that he had committed I was very disheartened. Stapel’s actions could have serious implications on not only social psychology, but all capacities in psychology. As an undergraduate student I look up to the research done by psychologists, and unfortunately it made me contemplate about other studies that have been done by other researches. Stapel was an extremely intelligent man, I don’t think anyone would deny that, and unfortunately he felt he had to live up to the expectations put upon him, even if it meant lying about his data. As we all know researchers are not rewarded for conducting research, they are rewarded for publishing papers. I do not want to be cynical, and I really do have hope in the fact that this is an isolated incident, and we can trust for the most part the articles in published journals.
If I would have read one of Diederik Stapel’s studies before these past three weeks, I would have thought he was a genius. All of his research and every study he has published seems to make perfect sense when reading through it. After learning about the fabrication of his data, I feel like his fraud should have been discovered a lot earlier. It seems so obvious reading through the pages and pages of Stapel’s work now that the data was manipulated. As the authors of the interim report said the data was “too good to be true” when looking back over the studies.
I still believe Stapel is a genius. Maybe not for his work and advancements in psychology, but possibly for being able to fool the entire world for so long. In order to pull something this astonishing off, it would take more effort and double checking that it would to just gather actual data and analyze that. This makes me question his motive for this whole scheme. In the end, it doesn’t matter why he did it. What matters is that the fraud occurred and now the entire world has to deal with the repercussions.
There are many issues that have come to the surface from Diederik Stapel’s fraud. My first thought goes straight to the graduate students that studied under him and went on the receive their doctorate degrees. Earning your doctorate degree takes a lot of time and dedication to your study. If there was a chance that my doctorate could be taken because I unfortunately studied under him and his fabricated data, I would be more than furious. I think there are many good things that can come from this awful situation though. We now know how important whistleblowers are and that we should be double checking that all data is legitimate and not fabricated. In the end, this is an unfortunate situation but I believe a lot can be learned from it to better the future of the psychology world.
After hearing about what Diederik Stapel did I was astonished that someone would actually fake results of a study. I wonder why Stapel would do something like this. Did he think he was going to be unsuccessful with the studies he was doing and lose credibility because of it or did he get lazy because he was so successful. It is unfortunate for the field of psychology that something like this happened, now it will be much more difficult for people to get published in these journals and they will be under far more scrutiny. It could also possibly hamper the growth of the field; people may be less likely to join because of this incident. Hopefully there will also be positive effects of this; people will realize that their work will be called into question and complete their studies correctly. Although I did find it very interesting that the “reproducibility project” was created to replicate findings from other studies in order to see how many studies are fraudulent. Could it be that other people have done the same thing as Stapel? If so it could be an interesting predicament for the field of psychology, and certainly call into question the credibility of the researchers and their studies.
It seems to me that Diederik Stapel is a man like any other. I believe he has morals similar to many people. His fraud is the focus of our class’s discussions recently, but from what I can tell is that (like most people) we are committing fundamental attribution error. We have become aware of his fraud and initially declare him an evil human being. Some people have gone as far as to say that in order to commit this tragic fraud he must have been a sociopath. When it is a complete possibility that this man had simple been raised to a position of great achievement, and in order to maintain this high level of productive research, was required to falsify data. I personally hold social psychology near to my heart, as I am strongly considering a career in this field. That being said, I am appalled by the Stapel fraud as I am with all fraudulent data, but I would take caution in hastily condemning his humanity. What this does create is an opportunity for all of the psychological community to hold ourselves to a higher standard than what we previously have. The creation of a flagging method for fraudulent data (referenced above) will give psychology a means to self monitor at a much needed higher degree.
While reading Staple’s article, I thought it was well written. I had to keep reminding myself while reading that this was a fraudulent experiment. I then found myself thinking about all the students who’s degrees are being questioned all because of this along with the schools.
Because of Staple it is going to be harder for students going into graduate school, and even proffesional psychologists to publish in magazines. It just seems to me that it took more time and effort to fabricate the data and experiments then it would take to actually do the expeiments.
This being a huge shock to the field of psychology there is the wonder of how people he had worked with troughout the years could have missed that these experiments had been fradulent, especially the ones who helped him. Not only this but anybody in the field of psychology. It is hard to beleive that someone could have so many experiments work out. This is not to realistic in the field.
Although this was a huge shock to the field of psychology it makes everyone in the field think more critically about other people’s experiments. It can also give some the opportunity to try and replicate the experiments to test for validity. Everyone will think differently, and especailly more cautiously because of Staple’s fraudulent experiments.
When I first became aware of what Diederik Stapel had done pertaining to the fraudulent data in many of his publications, of which many were published in prominent journals (now all retracted of course), I found myself to be biased when reading some of his studies that may have had legitimate data . It was difficult for me to think of him as a brilliant social psychologist after reading the interim report that was released back in October of 2011 because what he did was such a shock to the psychology world and devastated many people. I believe that what his did hurt so many people in the process and it can’t be taken back. The universities that he taught at certainly have lost some of their reputability because of this and most likely have lost grants and funding. It would be difficult to take those universities psychology programs seriously. Then there were the students who were studying under Stapel’s supervision and looked up to him through their studies. It would be quite distressing to be one of those students, just finishing up their final year of school only to realize that your mentor and friend was a fraud. The world of social psychology has also suffered quite the blow because of this. One aspect that I don’t understand is why exactly did Stapel do this? I believe that he is a bright man and is accomplished; so why not use his own knowledge to prove himself? It would seem that it would be a lot of hard work to make up all this data that is practically perfect. In the end, this may have hurt the psychology research world, but it has learned from the incident and will continue to be a prominent division in the social sciences.
Like several of my fellow classmates, when I first heard about the Stapel incident I was astonished that someone would go to such lengths to make up false data and findings. When we went over his articles in class the logic behind them and the results he claimed to have gotten made sense and really astonished me to see just how many of his articles were actually false and made up.
As we discussed this further in class the one thing that stuck out in my mind was the fact that students prior to these had also gone to the higher ups and were kind of brushed off. I wonder how many articles wouldn’t have had to be rescinded if the power to be would have listened the first time. It had to be extremely difficult for those students to take the needed steps to point out the errors they had found, and to have the administration brush them off had to have an effect on them as far as questioning a person of authority in the future.
This professor was brilliant and could have done so much more with his career that what he had done. Instead of being known for all the work he did in research, he will now be known for the man who committed fraud harming the research integrity. The people affected by his lack of integrity are countless, from his co-authors to the institution he was working for. The ones I feel were robbed the most by this actions were his graduate students who looked up to him and respected him. They accepted his guidance as they started out their own careers in this field and I am afraid that they may start questioning their ability because of this.
The APA did a wonderful job looking into this and trying to fix the errors he made. I hope in the future when someone’s work becomes questionable that it won’t be ignored and instead be taken very seriously.
After reviewing the claims against Stapel, I am wondering why he felt it necessary to lie about the data collections and results. Stapel’s studies would have been brilliantly executed, and the results would have been interesting. He had a superb imagination for experiments, and I am curious why he wasted his brilliance on fraudulent acts. He either didn’t take into account for the people he would hurt, or he just didn’t care. The field of social psychology is now suffering a severe blow to the credibility of research findings. Hopefully everyone will take any a lesson from Stapel’s mistakes and improve the validity of their work
I, like everyone else in the psychology community, was shocked and appaled to learn about Stapel’s fraudulent findings. The first thing I thought was, “Why would you go through all that trouble to falsify evidence? Wouldn’t it take less work to just do the work legitimately?” While it is easy to make up fake data if you just enter a data set from your Graphing Calculator, that data would be completely random. He had to have sat down and actually thought about what data would make sense and be realistic. Being a prestigious researcher, people trusted him to conduct proper experiments and certainly to report as accurate data as humanly possible. Not only did he fail himself, and his career as a researcher, he failed the entire psychological community and actually provided some doubt in the minds of many. Many people already doubt psychological research as is, what are the doubtful going to think now? There will always be doubt regarding psychological studies. Psychology has come so far as a science; it is so widely used today. It is a shame that one man, due to his own ego and lack of ambition, has pushed psychology back into speculation. One positive aspect of the unveiling of his fraud, is that any other researchers with the same intent now see that just making up data, reports, and experiments is not fool proof, and can lead to exposure, humiliation, and completely ruin one’s credibility in all bouts of research. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around Stapel’s deception, and cannot understand the logic behind putting so much effort into something that isn’t even real.
When I was first made aware of the Stapel incident I was shocked. The first thought that popped into my mind was “Why would somebody do this?”. Then as I began reading articles by Diedrik Stapel I became even more confused because he seemed like such an intelligent man, so I was now thinking “He could have made these studies successful and interesting without using fraudulent data”. When I was reading the “Interim report regarding the breach of scientific integrity committed by Prof. D.A. Stapel”, which was one of the first things we read on it, I was shocked how much the concept of hindsight bias came into mind. Reading it now, it seemed so obvious which made me wonder how they possibly missed it when it was happening. The thing that raised the biggest red flag for me was how confidential he was about his information and how he never provided the raw data, even to the graduate students working with him.
I guess the authors of this interim report said it right when they said the data was “too good to be true.” I believe it is a shame that he would do something like this when he doesn’t have to. This fraudulent act is going to forever change how people look at research articles, especially those in Social Psychology. I do agree with the authors of many articles that have been published since the incident, including the interim report, there needs to be more people who step up instead of chickening out when they think research is false so it doesn’t get this far again.
I think what bothers me the most about the Stapel incident is the fact that people with such special gifts are using them in negative ways. While reading some of Stapel’s writings the word genius popped into my head several times. I do think he had a point of view and very interesting ideas, so why fake all of it? I think he would have still gotten the recognition he desired, and his findings would mean so much more. I think some of the more ground breaking studies should be replicated to see what kind of results would actually be produced.
I don’t know if Stapel just got greedy, or so wrapped up in himself he thought he could do no wrong,but it’s just so frustrating to know so many people were affected by one person’s actions. I hope Stapel’s conviction will make a lasting impression on the psych “world” and honest, important research can continue to be done.
I just have to laugh when reading most of these articles, mostly because in their titles it says something about fraud data so when I’m reading them I laugh and think of how ridiculous it is to create fake data. Everyone doing this must be super smart and have sly ways around these experiments, because I just think that if I were to do any type of fake experiment, everyone would know that it was not actual real research. In reading “The Truth Wears Off” by Jonah Lehrer, I can’t believe that they were testing drugs and had an effect but it wasn’t significant so they faked the data to make it significant. Testing DRUGS!! How in the world does that even fly in the experimental psychology world when testing something that goes into someone’s body to make them feel better when the results are being faked? There should be more people that question original studies and replicating them, from various places and then collaborate after the fact so that the study can actually be reliable instead of faked, but then it becomes really difficult to question those people who are higher up on the ladder of success. But like it was stated in “Is Psychology About to Come Undone?” by Tom Bartlett, people don’t check up on your research because it is really time consuming and it doesn’t do a whole lot to replicate someone else’s study and undermining someone’s work is not a good way to make friends. I thought that article was a really good one to rely on because it gave a few examples of researchers who are re-doing some studies that have been done already. In the article “Psychology’s Woes and a Partial Cure: The Value of Replication” by Henry L. Roediger, III, it explained why replicating an article is valuable and can have some significant results even if you modify the original study just a little bit to try to get the same results. When reading the original Stapel article about how even his students thought something was wrong with his studies, he just told them he had everything already and they just had to analyze the data instead of actually going out to do the research. Number one, that would put me on edge if I was “researching” under someone and didn’t even get to go out and get samples for research on my own. I am not sure if it is just me, but I would be honored if I was doing some research and then someone else decided to do a similar study and then found results that were similar to mine, I feel like it goes to show that if you have a study that can be replicated and the same results are shown that your study is reliable and can be seen in society as an influence for greater work. All in all, I believe studies should be able to be replicated and instead of people feeling threatened for replication, they should be honored.
Especially after reading the interim report of the Stapel fraud, there is no question that many individuals negatively suffered and will continue to suffer from the wrongdoings done in this unfortunate situation. With this put aside, I do believe that this event may have been necessary (although it saddens me to see innocent people hurt by this) to bring to psychological journals’ attention that more needs to be done/required to have research accepted and published. Although the process did involve stringent requirements, especially by the most prestigious journals, these journals must further safeguard against those rare circumstances in which individuals are so brilliant that even they can escape the system. The innate human characteristic of greed must be guarded against, even though there are many individuals who do not buy into greed. Although it would be wonderful to go about the evaluation process with some sort of “honor system” believed of researchers collecting and correctly evaluating their data, it appears that potential journal pieces should be checked and computed at every step, no matter how mundane a task, before publishing to correct not only human, honest mistakes, but also the (hopefully) few malicious ones. This incident makes one question if journals have overlooked the statistical checking process, and if more than “one simple error” occurred in the case of Stapel’s articles unnoticed, it may be beneficial to check previous articles for just plain and simple human mistakes that were not done intentionally. Because we have discovered the surprise of Diederik Stapel’s unknown data activities, the idea of replicating published studies in journals sounds very relevant and also intelligent. Perhaps then the community of Psychology and in particular Social Psychology can further understand whether to consider this as a “freak incident” that happened only once maliciously, or whether ethics is something that needs to have more of a focus in the classroom when training students to become successful and honorable researchers in the field. It is easy to see how one can get caught up in the research spotlight by getting numerous publications and earning a name for yourself as a successful researcher, which is something that I believe Stapel illuded to in a statement that Dr. Simpson presented us with. Perhaps this drive promoted by the field to publish and publish as quickly as possible shouldn’t be the focus so much as the quality of the publication should be. If this outlook is changed, maybe the integrity of research could benefit. It will be interesting (and possibly scary) to see whether this sort of manipulation of data has occurred more than once in published articles, because this research that is considered “accepted” lays the foundation for researchers to build upon. Finally, I believe honest, integrious, and true researchers should be given a round of applause because even if their name is not as famous as others, the simple fact that their findings are real and their experimental processes were sound provide the basis for really understanding our social world around us which is very meaningful and reaches so many individuals. In the field, I believe one should judge fame more on quality rather than quantity, because being famous can turn sour quickly, really, in anything that you do. Ultimately, I believe the future for psychological research will be brighter than ever, because the quality of publication will improve. This sad and scary incident can inspire hope rather than fear for psychological research.
After reading Diederik Stapel’s published article,
“Coping with Chaos: How Disordered Contexts Promote Stereotyping
and Discrimination”, I found myself forgetting he was a fraudulent social
psychological researcher. His published article sounded so convincing and the results seemed practical. However, after reading the article for the second time, I picked up on subtle details that Dr. Simpson noted in class. I noticed that Stapel was able to collect his data anywhere. Noted in the article, he conveniently was able to collect research in a clean train station because workers in the Netherlands provided him a unique opportunity. Details, such as these, had me start to question the article and the content it contained.
I do believe it is a shame that Stapel was convicted of fraud. However, I find myself wondering why he went to such measures to produce fraudulent work. My hope in the future is that psychologists around the world will realize the controversy and hurt Stapel has caused and learn from it.