Faking Science: a True Story of Academic Fraud Diederik Stapel
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Faking Science: A True Story of Academic Fraud Diederik Stapel Translated by Nicholas J. L. Brown a © CC-BY-NC-ND 2014 Diederik Stapel, Nicholas J. L. Brown This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may not use this work for commercial purposes; you may not distribute any altered, transformed, or extended versions of this work. Version history 2014-12-14 Version 1.00 b He was killed late in the afternoon on a country road with his learner’s permit in his pocket. He swerved to avoid a porcupine, and drove straight into a large tree. I thought you should know. — Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? c Translator’s Note This translation of Diederik Stapel’s book a reasonably faithful to the Dutch original, which was published in late 2012 under the title “Ontsporing” (“Derailment”),. One or two paragraphs that were likely to be of interest only to a Dutch or Dutch-speaking audience have been removed, and some examples and analogies have been reframed in American terms. Additionally, the “ Notes, thoughts, and apologies” section has been considerably reduced in length. We anticipated that an English-language edition of this book might also require some other parts of the story to be shortened or removed entirely, and perhaps one or two to be enhanced a little. However, since we have now decided to give the book away, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to change anything further. The translation process took place over more than a year, from May 2013 until today. For a variety of reasons, the chapters were not translated in their original order; the actual sequence was 3, 8, 9, 10, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10½, 1. As my working relationship with DS developed, the style and “voice” of the translated narrative evolved somewhat. The chapters that were translated later in the process are (I hope) more consistent and idiomatic in style. That said, DS is a much better literary writer than I am, so there are still plenty of places where the reader will (correctly) think, “This reads like it’s been translated from another language.” I have attempted to use U.S. English vocabulary and idiom wherever possible, but as a native speaker of British English I suspect that there are quite a few places where I may not have managed this. Please feel free to suggest improvements, point out typographical errors, etc. I was inspired to offer to translate the book when I read a review of the Dutch edition by Denny Borsboom and Erik-Jan Wagenmakers, posted at http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2013/january- 13/derailed-the-rise-and-fall-of-diederik-stapel.html. When I saw Neuroskeptic’s comment (“I wonder if this will ever be translated into English? I’d love that to happen. And I’d donate to a fund to pay a translator.”), I realized that I was in a position to do it. (That fund never materialized—not that I expected it to—so I am not making a penny from this!) i Reaction from my recently-acquired colleagues in the world of academia was mixed; some told me it would be a very bad idea to go anywhere near this project, while others strongly encouraged me to go ahead. In the end I sounded out some Dutch psychologists— whose objections, if any, would hold the greatest weight for me—and the vast majority of them were in favor. As one of them put it, “Normally, people who commit scientific fraud deny everything and crawl away. To have Stapel’s confession available in English would be really important for science.” Personally I think this book represents a lot more than a confession; I will leave the final judgment on that point to the reader. The appearance of the Dutch version of the book caused quite a lot of controversy. I hope that the fact that the English translation is available free of charge (for which thanks are due to Prometheus, the publishers of the Dutch version of the book) will avoid that, but otherwise, as it says on the tube: if irritation occurs, discontinue use. My aim is not to defend DS—I take no view on whether this book is an accurate representation of the events described within it—but simply to make his story available to a wider audience, and perhaps contribute in a modest way to his social rehabilitation. While I don’t expect to see him teaching psychology or conducting research in a university setting any time soon, I think he still has plenty to contribute. Nicholas J. L. Brown ([email protected]) Strasbourg, France December 14, 2014 ii 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. iii I started writing because I wanted (or, rather, needed) to find out more about myself. But how do you do that? I wasn’t used to writing about myself. How was I supposed to work out which parts of me, my life, my memories were relevant and which not? What was part of the story and what wasn’t? Until my fraud was discovered, I’d always had a fairly ordinary, normal, happy life; never done anything exceptional or weird. Just like millions of others, I’d had a happy childhood, grown up in a good family, gone to a good school. I went to college like thousands of other people, fell in love like everyone does, and quite often had trouble getting to sleep at night. A-ha... but was that anything special? Should I write about that? On the day in September 2011 when my life took a bizarre turn as my faked science came to light, everything I had ever done or felt or thought suddenly became a potentially critical event. How could it have gotten so far? Was it because I used to obsess about not treading on the lines between the sidewalk tiles when running home from school? Maybe. Or my colorblindness? Maybe. Was it a conflict between my extraverted behavior and my introverted feelings? Maybe. How about my fondness for really strange artwork on rock album covers? Maybe. So whereas before I’d never had anything to write about when it came to myself, because I had what I thought was such a boring and normal life, after I fell off a cliff it seemed like every boring, normal detail was potentially worth examining and describing, because maybe it contained a clue to what I was going to bury myself with later. Now that I’d crashed with a loud rending of metal and bent my life out of shape beyond any possibility of repair, every single apparently meaningless detail of my life took on the status of “possible clue.” My home town? Acting? Films? Police raids? Poetry? Marshall McLuhan? Neil Postman? Utopia? Context effects? Nihilism? Bach? Conference hotels? Raymond Carver? Drinking coffee on my own? School lessons? Groningen? Applause? The chaos of Manhattan? The structure of the Netherlands seen from the air? Propped-up trees in Limburg? Pumice? Amsterdam? Schiedam? Fear of heights? An attic window? A public bathhouse in Budapest? Fra Angelico? The Russian Revolution? A field of rye? All kinds of memories, inspirations, and random neural firings that popped up in my head while I was writing and started to connect to each other.