Diederik Stapel

“What I had done was terrible and almost impossible to understand. There was no rhyme or reason to it. So once again I felt the need to emphasize that my downfall couldn’t be explained away with a couple of glib theories, sound bites, or one-line summaries. You could come up with a whole list of possible explanations: a desire to achieve something, naked ambition, laziness, nihilism, a lust for power, status anxiety, the urge to find solutions, the need to feel whole, pressure to “publish or perish”, arrogance, emotional flakiness, loneliness, disappointment, low attention span, addiction to answers, etc etc etc, but none of these constructs had sufficient explanatory power to reveal why I’d done what I had. You’d need the whole set, and then a whole lot more. I’d spent years trying to find simpler and more concise explanations and theories to describe human behavior, but all the time that I’d been looking for order, structure, and simplicity, I’d been
keeping my eyes more and more tightly shut to reality until the inevitable happened, and I’d crashed and burned. And in so doing, I’d rather neatly proven the opposite of what I’d been looking for. If you want things to be extremely clear and simple, just close your eyes.”
― Diederik Stapel, Faking Science: A True Story of Academic Fraud