I hadn’t known about this case, reported in today’s New York Times, but perhaps some of you had. It’s a fascinating tale about the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, who fudged data for dozens of papers—data comporting with people’s intuitive ideas about human nature—and became famous along the way.  He eventually got caught and fired.  He seems to mistake explanation for apology, and I think his only regret is that he got caught.

Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said. He described his behavior as an addiction that drove him to carry out acts of increasingly daring fraud, like a junkie seeking a bigger and better high.

Stapel gives a lot of excuses but his apologies sound lame.  And while waiting for the investigations to end—get this—he published a book called Derailed, designed to get money by detailing his perfidy. Here’s an explanation but not an apology:

What the public didn’t realize, he said, was that academic science, too, was becoming a business. “There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition,” he said. “Normal people go to the edge to get that money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman. I am on the road. People are on the road with their talk. With the same talk. It’s like a circus.” He named two psychologists he admired — John Cacioppo and Daniel Gilbert — neither of whom has been accused of fraud. “They give a talk in Berlin, two days later they give the same talk in Amsterdam, then they go to London. They are traveling salesmen selling their story.”

The duplicity started when he did a “priming” experiment as a young professor, showing subjects images of an attractive or less attractive female and asking them to rate their own attractiveness. He assumed that the prettier image would make the students, by comparison, rate themselves less attractive, but it didn’t work. He therefore decided to fudge the data to get the desired result. The laborious fudging—his results had to be significant, but not too big, lest they be suspicious—probably took longer than the experiment itself! Nevertheless, the new outcome jibed with what people intuited was true, and he became famous.

Other experiments followed, all faked, in which, for instance, he showed (i.e., fudged) data that white people waiting on a train platform would become more racist if they were surrounded by garbage. (They’d sit farther from a black person in a row of seats.) That was published in Science. Another fraudulent study purported to show that kids who colored a cartoon became more likely to share their candy if the cartoon character was depicted shedding a tear.

Stapel became famous because he got results that jibed with what people “wanted.” And the journal editors and reviewers liked them too.  The Times lays some blame at the door of those reviewers:

At the end of November, the universities unveiled their final report at a joint news conference: Stapel had committed fraud in at least 55 of his papers, as well as in 10 Ph.D. dissertations written by his students. The students were not culpable, even though their work was now tarnished. The field of psychology was indicted, too, with a finding that Stapel’s fraud went undetected for so long because of “a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data.” If Stapel was solely to blame for making stuff up, the report stated, his peers, journal editors and reviewers of the field’s top journals were to blame for letting him get away with it. The committees identified several practices as “sloppy science” — misuse of statistics, ignoring of data that do not conform to a desired hypothesis and the pursuit of a compelling story no matter how scientifically unsupported it may be.

Well, according to the article Stapel went to great lengths to make his data seem credible, and the writer of the piece, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, doesn’t seem to have looked at the manuscripts to see if sloppy practices were pervasive (I’d like to know what they were), but reviewers often don’t pore over manuscripts nearly as carefully as committees designed to detect fraud. I don’t blame the system nearly as much as I do Stapel here. I think his students are also at fault: how can you put your name on a Ph.D. dissertation if you didn’t collect the data yourself?

And if you read the piece, Stapel seems curiously unapologetic, like Jonah Lehrer when he got caught making up quotes. Yes, Stapel became depressed, but it seems more because he was found out, not because he committed fraud and ruined the careers of many of his students.

Fortunately, many psychology studies get repeated.  Daryl Bem’s study on precognition, which showed that subjects’ knowledge seemingly affected their behavior in the past (before they had that knowledge), ultimately proved unrepeatable.

I’ve always thought that there should be Institutes for Repeatability, where studies that yielded flashy or novel results should be repeated by independent investigators. Not only in psychology, of course, but also in areas where experiments usually aren’t repeated. Those include ecology and evolutionary biology which, unlike molecular biology, are fields in which successive studies don’t always build on earlier ones (that “building” often means repeating earlier work).  I’m not accusing my colleagues of widespread fraud, of course, but there’s a tendency to publish only positive results (ensuring that 5% of them are wrong), and the messiness of organismal biology means that whole-animal studies may be influenced by the vagaries of weather, location, the population chosen, or other factors that make the results hard to generalize.

My own guess—and this is pure speculation—is that about 30-40% of whol- organismal biology studies in ecology and evolution would not give the same results if repeated. Two classic studies of this type were Thoday and Gibson’s early work showing that a population of flies could split into two reproductively isolated units (in effect, species) when selected for divergent bristle numbers but still allowed to mate with each other. That paper was published in Nature, and yet 19 attempts to repeat it failed. Likewise, early studies showing that putting populations of fruit flies through “bottlenecks” (very small population sizes) could, after a number of generations, make those populations reproductively isolated from each other, suggesting that random genetic drift itself could contribute to speciation.  Repeats of those studies didn’t give the flashy results.

The lesson: if a study seems too good to be true, let someone else repeat it.  And give them funding to do so—something that no funding agency wants to do.