This story is such an abortion on toast, even Conservatives find it difficult to believe. But I absolutely do not disbelieve, because I know Leftists when I see and smell them.
Would it shock you to believe that a so-called Social Psychologist ran a Leftist scam for decades over the world? And that Leftists bought into his LIES and DECEIT?
From the NYTimes.com:
Zeelenberg (a friend of Stapel), a stocky man with a shaved head, led Stapel into his living room. “What’s up?” Stapel asked, settling onto a couch. Two graduate students had made an accusation, Zeelenberg explained. His eyes began to fill with tears. “They suspect you have been committing research fraud.”
After he got home that night, he confessed to his wife. A week later, the university suspended him from his job and held a news conference to announce his fraud. It became the lead story in the Netherlands and would dominate headlines for months. Overnight, Stapel went from being a respected professor to perhaps the biggest con man in academic science.
This GOWP — a Guilty Over-educated White Person — was a LIAR and a CHEAT.
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.
And Stapel’s lies FED into the meme, the narrative, that Leftists WANTED to be true, to be accurate, to be immured in Truth.
Because, after all, Stapel affected not only Religious Leftists (those Devout who blindingly believe in Anthropomorphic Global Warming) but Religious Socialists (those Devout who blindingly believe that Caucasoids are responsible, societally, for whatever ills suit the decade).
Trust me when I write that NONE of the Leftists in our nation want to be reading my post right now. Because it exposes such an egregious falsehood that even Leftists cringe in their knowledge.
When I asked Stapel if he had told me the truth, he looked offended. He didn’t have any reason to lie anymore, he said. For more than a decade, he ran an experiment in deceit, and now he was finally ready for the truth — to understand how and why he ended up in this place. “When you live your life and suddenly something extreme happens,” he said, “your whole life becomes a bag of possible explanations for why you are here now.”
Poor baby.
In his early years of research — when he supposedly collected real experimental data — Stapel wrote papers laying out complicated and messy relationships between multiple variables. He soon realized that journal editors preferred simplicity. “They are actually telling you: ‘Leave out this stuff. Make it simpler,’ ” Stapel told me. Before long, he was striving to write elegant articles.
Here we go. We’re coming close to both a reason and an excuse. Existentially and mentally.
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.”
So he fabricated because he wanted money. Damn those Capitalists and their cash! If only we weren’t a cash-driven society! I did it because I was corrupted!
Then he had a Lying Epiphany:
The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his hypothesis was valid. “I said — you know what, I am going to create the data set,” he told me.
If he didn’t get the results he wanted, he would create them.
He started out “small.”
Sitting at his kitchen table in Groningen, he began typing numbers into his laptop that would give him the outcome he wanted. He knew that the effect he was looking for had to be small in order to be believable; even the most successful psychology experiments rarely yield significant results. The math had to be done in reverse order: the individual attractiveness scores that subjects gave themselves on a 0-7 scale needed to be such that Stapel would get a small but significant difference in the average scores for each of the two conditions he was comparing. He made up individual scores like 4, 5, 3, 3 for subjects who were shown the attractive face. “I tried to make it random, which of course was very hard to do,” Stapel told me.
Oh, the pain Stapel suffered!
But, things were good:
Stapel’s career took off. He published more than two dozen studies while at Groningen, many of them written with his doctoral students. They don’t appear to have questioned why their supervisor was running many of the experiments for them. Nor did his colleagues inquire about this unusual practice.
When he didn’t get what he wanted:
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.
But then: a QUESTION.
Rumors of fraud trailed Stapel from Groningen to Tilburg, but none raised enough suspicion to prompt investigation. Stapel’s atypical practice of collecting data for his graduate students wasn’t questioned, either. Then, in the spring of 2010, a graduate student noticed anomalies in three experiments Stapel had run for him. When asked for the raw data, Stapel initially said he no longer had it. Later that year, shortly after Stapel became dean, the student mentioned his concerns to a young professor at the university gym. Each of them spoke to me but requested anonymity because they worried their careers would be damaged if they were identified.
But who can DARE to question Leftists? No one can! They have a meme and they cannot be disturbed with such inconsequential and trivial bits as actual facts.
Except when the meme is somehow shattered:
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.
Fraud? Lies?
And so realize THIS, you jejune Religious Leftist dupes:
Under a Leftist regime, “science” is nothing more than a business. Just like oil.
That you will lose when the cash evaporates.
Doesn’t Stapel look great in his jeans and relaxed grey sweater?
BZ
