Human Science Is Only Human

Jerry Adler reports on how fabricated studies and manipulated data have created a crisis in the experimental social sciences:

Amid a flurry of retracted papers, prominent researchers have resigned their posts, including Marc Hauser, a star evolutionary psychologist at Harvard and acclaimed author, and Diederik Stapel, a Dutch psychologist who admitted that many of his eye-catching results were based on data he made up. And in 2012, the credibility of a number of high-profile findings in the hot area of “priming”—a phenomenon in which exposure to verbal or visual clues unconsciously affects behavior—was called into question when researchers were unable to replicate them. These failures prompted Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning psychologist at Princeton, founding father of behavioral economics, and best-selling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, to warn in an email to colleagues of an impending “train wreck” in social psychology. …

[T]he current critique of experimental social science is coming mainly from the inside. [Nina] Strohminger, [Joseph P.] Simmons, and a handful of other mostly young researchers are at the heart of a kind of reform movement in their field. Together with a loose confederation of crusading journal editors and whistle-blowing bloggers, they have begun policing the world of experimental research, assiduously rooting out fraud and error, as if to rescue the scientific method from embarrassment—and from its own success.