Faking Science: A True Story of Academic Fraud

by Diederik Stapel, Nicholas J.L. Brown (Translator)

Foreword to the Dutch edition
I’ve spun off, lost my way, crashed and burned; whatever you want to call it. It’s not much fun. I was doing fine, but then I became impatient, overambitious, reckless. I wanted to go faster and better and higher and smarter, all the time. I thought it would help if I just took this one tiny little shortcut, but then I found myself more and more often in completely the wrong lane, and in the end I wasn’t even on the road at all. I left the road where I should have gone straight on, and made my own, spectacular, destructive, fatal accident. I’ve ruined my life, but that’s not the worst of it. My recklessness left a multiple pile-up in its wake, which caught up almost everyone important to me: my wife and children, my parents and siblings, colleagues, students, my doctoral candidates, the university, psychology, science, all involved, all hurt or damaged to some degree or other. That’s the worst part, and it’s something I’m going to have to learn to live with for the rest of my life, along with the shame and guilt. I’ve got more regrets than hairs on my head, and an infinite amount of time to think about them.
This book is an attempt to reconstruct my spin-off and the inevitable crash into a very solid wall that followed it. Hopefully this reconstruction will allow for a better understanding of what happened, for me but also for others who want to know. What did I do? How did it start? And why did it get so stupidly out of control? And, above all: who am I, really? Or perhaps, if I’m lucky: who was I, really?
So, this book is not intended to be a witness statement or a charge sheet. It’s not a research report and it’s not a comment on other research reports. This is my own, personal, selective, biased story about my downfall. It’s nothing more than a series of images, sketches, thoughts, and anecdotes, which together form an attempt to understand myself (and maybe find myself again?). It started more or less by chance, as a bit of occupational therapy. I’d been fired, was stuck at home, hated myself, been feeling depressed for months. Writing kept me busy, plus—as I knew from some piece of psychological research I’d read somewhere one time—writing about a bad experience helps your recovery from that experience. So I started writing my thoughts and feelings in a small black notebook.

Genres: Science, Psychology, Biography

224 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Nicole Abi-Esber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting for those interested in psychology research... but unreliable narrator.

[Ray Volkin · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book could have been an email.

In a half hearted attempt to wash away his guilt, this clearly over-privileged, narcissistic, white euro nationalist recounts his glory days as an actor while casually dusting in truths of his academic misconduct. The reader has to bear through almost 60 pages of worthless, irrelevant ramblings about this man’s young dreams to take the stage with unsolicited teachings of psychological phenomena this man clearly tries to use and abuse to gain ethos with the reader. Personally, I don’t feel the need to be educated by one of science’s biggest clowns, nor do I care about a failed go at theater that the author clearly still clings to. I don’t feel this man is truly sorry for what he did but rather sorry he got caught. The English title is misleading as this isn’t a story as to why and how he got caught, but instead a very windy and unnecessary memoir where a man tries to prove his worth after getting caught completely forging everything he based his livelihood upon while boasting his educational prowess and showmanship.

[Ioana]

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/ma...

Several times in our conversation, Stapel alluded to having a fuzzy, postmodernist relationship with the truth, which he agreed served as a convenient fog for his wrongdoings. “It’s hard to know the truth,” he said. “When somebody says, ‘I love you,’ how do I know what it really means?”

The car let out a warning beep to indicate that we had exceeded the speed limit. Stapel slowed down. I asked him if he wished there had been some sort of alarm system for his career before it unraveled. “That would have been helpful, sure,” he said. “I think I need shocks, though. This is not enough.” Some friends, he said, asked him what could have made him stop. “I am not sure,” he told me. “I don’t think there was going to be an end. There was no stop button. My brain was stuck. It had to explode. This was the only way.”

Stapel dumped most of the questionnaires into a trash bin outside campus. At home, using his own scale, he weighed a mug filled with M&M’s and sat down to simulate the experiment. While filling out the questionnaire, he ate the M&M’s at what he believed was a reasonable rate and then weighed the mug again to estimate the amount a subject could be expected to eat. He built the rest of the data set around that number. He told me he gave away some of the M&M stash and ate a lot of it himself. “I was the only subject in these studies,” he said.

And yet as part of a graduate seminar he taught on research ethics, Stapel would ask his students to dig back into their own research and look for things that might have been unethical. “They got back with terrible lapses­,” he told me. “No informed consent, no debriefing of subjects, then of course in data analysis, looking only at some data and not all the data.” He didn’t see the same problems in his own work, he said, because there were no real data to contend with.

Each was a choice made by the scientist every time he or she came to a fork in the road of experimental research — one way pointing to the truth, however dull and unsatisfying, and the other beckoning the researcher toward a rosier and more notable result that could be patently false or only partly true.

I asked Zeelenberg how he felt toward Stapel a year and a half after reporting him to the rector. He told me that he found himself wanting to take a longer route to the grocery store to avoid walking past Stapel’s house, lest he run into him.
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(And what happened to the questionnaires?) I don’t like having piles of paper lying around, so I threw them away. (Where?) In a dumpster that I found by the side of the road. (Where? Which street? Do you think the dumpster has been emptied since then?) That’s what I did. That’s how it was. (Do you even believe this yourself?) It’s unorthodox, I know. It’s not the kosher way to do things. But that’s just how I roll. (That’s just how you roll?) That’s just how I roll.

Maarten carried on talking about the conference, but I’d stopped listening. What could they have
found out? Everything? Surely not. Nobody would believe everything, surely? Nobody believes everything. Maybe I still had a chance? This was too big, too terrible, too weird; too big to fail, as they used to say about the banks.

My arrival in New York was spectacular. I’m not very good with small spaces and great heights. I don’t like getting into elevators, and I prefer not to have to spend too much time in a small toilet. I’m a little bit apprehensive of large apartment blocks, church towers, and high bridges, and I get a funny feeling in a stomach if I so much as look at a photo that’s been taken from very high up. There’s a famous picture that depicts the building of the Rockefeller Center in New York City. You can see ten or so building workers sitting on a girder, eating their lunch. The rest of the city—cars, pedestrians, other buildings—looks like a collection of scale models, hundreds of feet below them. With their sandwiches in their hands, they’re smiling at each other and at the photographer, who is presumably also delicately poised high in the sky near them. There’s hardly enough room to sit on the girder. One of the workers is looking at an engineering drawing; another is lighting his neighbor’s cigarette; a third is just staring straight ahead, looking a little tired. When I see that picture, I feel nauseous. Occasionally I look it up on the Internet, to see if I’m cured yet, but it hasn’t happened yet. In fact, the feeling gets worse every time. When I have to fly somewhere, I’m always a bit relieved when the flight passes without too much turbulence and I don’t have to take the barf bag from the seat pocket in front of me.


For me, however, this conclusion was liberating. If it’s really the case that the self doesn’t exist, then there’s nothing to worry about. If there’s no such thing as your own “I”, then you’re freed from the need to find answers to questions like “Who am I?” and “What do I want?” Reading Kouwer’s The Game of Personality brought me a sense of relief. All the time that I’d been trying to discover who I was and what I really wanted, I’d been asking myself questions that had no answers. And now that I knew it, I could leave those questions behind without regret.

[Hannah Peetz]

This is actually a well written and easy to read book. The story is fascinating and gives a great insight into the (problematic) research culture that is still pervasive to this day.

HOWEVER I advice anyone that wants to read this book NOT to buy it. You can find it in libraries, via friends or in other ways. This book was written by someone that earned money by faking research and is now still earning money by writing this book after he was caught.

[Gaëtan Mertens · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book. It's an easy read and an interesting case.
In fact, I started reading this book together with "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, but I found this book of Diederik Stapel much more interesting, partly because Kahneman partly builds his case using findings about social priming, which he described as undeniable facts, but now seem hard to replicate. In fact, I think Stapel's book provides a way more balanced view of environmnetal influences on human behaviour and decision making, probably because he doesn't have anything left to lose, while Kahneman has to defend why he got that nobel price (and therefore tends to give an overly optimistic reading of the fact, in my view; see also: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_...).

Apart from the content of this book about social psychology, it's primarily fascinating to read how Stapel faked his data and got away with it for as long as he did. He faked his data in very clumsy ways (filling in questionnaires by himself using different coloured pens, typing in full datasets by himself, copying data-files, ..). Despite that, he apparently managed to fool dozens of colleagues and publish in the highest journals, and it took three of his students (rather than colleagues, reviewers or editors) to expose his fraud.

The motivation he describes in the book to explain his fraud (wanting to publish, wanting answers, wanting praise) can be understood, although of course it can't be tolerated. Nevertheless, the environment he describes that facilitated his fraud (being left alone to do your research, little control by colleagues, little interest to see the actual data, but rather wanting to see the results) sound very familiar, and seem to have not changed much since his case (I work as a researcher in psychology myself).

The last chapters (apart from the final two last chapters that seemed to be unnecessary) about how the university and press treated his case made me quite angry. I understand that he definitely had to punished and this is acknowledged in the book. But the way he was publicly shamed seem completely out of proportion to me. He himself acknowledges that he is fully responsible for his fraud, but I think that if you can systematically get away with this fraud for that many years, there must be something wrong with the system as well. Nevertheless, he was singled out as a sociopathic manipulator, which do not correspond with the content of this book I find. Furthermore, he rightly points out that the general way of dealing with misconduct in universities is to keep things internal (which I've seen happening a few times, and hardly any consequences were tied to these cases), whereas his case was widely publicized.

I think this book would definitely be a worthwhile read for anyone doing academic research in psychology. It is bound to give you a more critical view of how research is handled in psychology. Most importantly, I think it points our how thin the line is between 'cleaning' and 'exploring' data and outright fraud (or how it becomes easy to go from the one to the other). And hopefully it will help people to not succumb to some of the perverse incentive systems that are in place in research, as Stapel did.

[Lauren Shawcross · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's rare that you get to hear someone explain themselves *after* they've come to terms with the fact that they've severely, unequivocally, and imploded their own life. I have to admit that, voyeuristically, I enjoyed this, though I am not necessarily saying we should take Stapel's account at face value. He has more than proven himself to be an unreliable narrator. Seriously, this guy really should've stuck with acting. Regardless, he has spun an engaging web here, one I was more than happy to be stuck in. I can't help but think he's telling the truth- the odd lack of apologia adds to my assessment. Stapel is not seeking forgiveness here; he seems to be telling the facts as-is. With his history of lies up in flames behind him, this is a bold strategy, and I admire the ballsiness of it all. At the same time, I understand those critiquing the man for seemingly trying to profit off of one of the worst professional frauds the world has ever heard of. I think Stapel has proven himself to be an unapologetically selfish huckster and a hack, but even so I acknowledge he is good at telling his story.

[Magdalena · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is partly an expose of social psychology for dummies, partly Stapel-o-centric, masochistic whining. I did not find it enjoyable or interesting.

[Marcin Copik · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5. The confession of one of the largest academic frauds in recent history - a Dutch psychologist who fabricated studies entirely over the decade. I skipped ~20% of the book because I found the details of the author's upbringing and family relations to be particularly boring. Writing is not great, and one has to patiently wait for the most interesting details.

Stapel provides a long introduction to his academic career and explains why he was trying to replicate high-impact research done by academic superstars. He felt he had simple yet brilliant ideas like others, but he could never get experimental data to support them. An interesting detail is how the cheating impacted his entire research group because he started to isolate himself, stopped networking, and avoided all meetings where people could ask difficult questions. He goes into details how he started with "improving data", but then there's a sudden jump from Excel manipulations to fabricating complete studies - what happened in between? It's a gradual process when one needs to break the cycle of lies, but there's no lesson to be learned there because Stapler is hiding all of the details. We only know how we managed to micro-manage his students. While the author is very upfront and apologetic, I am not convinced that he was completely honest, and I think he tried to diminish his responsibility.

The author dismisses other accusations related to mobbing and treatment of students. He only speaks of faking data, but there was an important element he tends to ignore: relationships with his own students were particularly problematic. His students never got to do any research because he had to control the entire study and fake the data. Thus, the damage he caused goes beyond retracted papers since his pupils never had a chance to learn.

A significant portion of the book is dedicated to a critique of the academic system. I find it very hard to disagree with him - the system is broken and encourages people to do sloppy science and salami publishing. I can see how it breaks people inside and forces scientists to cut corners. Yet, it feels that Stapler uses that to diminish his responsibility - "I did bad things, but not because I chose to, it was the system that forced me to".

Finally, as 99% of frauds and cheaters, he was caught. Would he ever admit willingly to his academic crimes? Or would he rather continue fabricating data to support grandiose research claims? In this book, Stapler convinced me that the latter is the most likely scenario.

[Sudip Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

In a 224 page book, Stapel devoted only a few paragraphs talking about the specific fraudulent acts he committed. He spent most of the book talking about his childhood, his parents, and how the investigators were supposedly mean to him (without concretely identifying anything unfair/unethical that the investigators did). I thought I'd read the confession of a contrite person but I was sorely disappointed. The lack of reflection and self-awareness makes me think that he deserved everything he got.

[Jukka Häkkinen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tuloksiaan väärentäneen hollantilaisen sosiaalipsykologin tunnustuskirja. Kirjassa pääsee hyvin sisään väärentäjän motivaatioihin ja ajatteluun. On myös kiinnostavaa lukea, mitä kiinni jäämisen jälkeen tapahtuu. Toisaalta kirjassa on myös valtavat määrät turhaa muistelua lapsuudesta ja muuta sälää. Kiinnostavin osio alkaa vasta noin sivulta 90.

[Je Tirn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most amazing pieces of writing I have ever read. Stapel, even in translation, is clever, creative, insightful, and a great teacher. He humanizes himself while telling the most amazing and horrific story of his career. This should be a must-read for everyone in science.

[Whoof]

An interesting read, Stapel recounts his experiences of committing large-scale scientific fraud. Of course, one wonders about his reliability as a narrator. A glimpse into the pressures and motivations of social psychologists and academic researches more generally. He was crushed by the media response to the uncovering of his story--appears remorseful. The existence of this book itself is interesting; it seems to be a way for him to cope/apologize/explain himself. Strange book! Perpetrator's side of the story. I read a free English translation so it isn't as if he got any $$ from my readership.

[Rolf Degen · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review is here:

https://plus.google.com/1010469164073...

also link to free and legal download of the eBook in epub and mobi (Kindle) format.