Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard aims his wit at his fellow scribes in a new report:
Lots of cultural writing these days, in books and magazines and newspapers, relies on the so-called Chump Effect. The Effect is defined by its discoverer, me, as the eagerness of laymen and journalists to swallow whole the claims made by social scientists. Entire journalistic enterprises, whole books from cover to cover, would simply collapse into dust if even a smidgen of skepticism were summoned whenever we read that “scientists say” or “a new study finds” or “research shows” or “data suggest.” Most such claims of social science, we would soon find, fall into one of three categories: the trivial, the dubious, or the flatly untrue.
A rather extreme example of this third option emerged last month when an internationally renowned social psychologist, Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, was proved to be a fraud. No jokes, please: This social psychologist is a fraud in the literal, perhaps criminal, and not merely figurative, sense. An investigative committee concluded that Stapel had falsified data in at least “several dozen” of the nearly 150 papers he had published in his extremely prolific career.
Perhaps “falsified” is too mild a word. Stapel didn’t just tweak and twist numbers, he made stuff up. With his colleagues, Science Insider reported, “he would discuss in detail experimental designs, including drafting questionnaires, and would then claim to conduct the experiments at high schools and universities with which he had special arrangements. The experiments, however, never took place.” Questionnaires are the mother’s milk of social science, given (most often) to collections of students who are easily accessible to the scientist. After being rewarded with course credits or money, the students go on to serve as proxies for humanity in general, as the scientist draws from their questionnaires large conclusions about the way human nature compels us, all of us, to think and act.
The conclusions that Stapel drew were large indeed. One thing he liked to demonstrate in his studies was the exploitive nature of democratic capitalism.
