The Call of the Finding

Some are worried that psychologists have become addicted to sound-bite results.

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Over the last few months, the news about one of the biggest cases of scientific fraud in recent memory—affecting more than 100 published research papers and resulting in the firing of Diderik Stapel from his post as the head of the Institute for Behavioral Economics Research at Tilburg University—has unfolded bit by bit, shocking the scientific community. Now the discussion is moving beyond the Stapel and overt data falsification and focusing on less obvious, even unintentional, examples of data misuse in the field of social psychology, which some worry are becoming increasingly common.

"If high-impact journals want this kind of surprising finding, then there is pressure on researchers to come up with this stuff," methodological expert Eric-Jan Wagenmakers of the University of Amsterdam told The ...

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Meet the Author

  • Jef Akst

    Jef Akst was managing editor of The Scientist, where she started as an intern in 2009 after receiving a master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses.
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