Not that plenty of other social psychologists around the world don’t fudge their research results; but those working in the Netherlands currently dominate the field, with Jens Forster (German, but works in Amsterdam) the latest high-profile example.
SUCCESSOR TO DIEDERIK STAPEL REVEALED one newspaper puts it, recalling the notorious fraudster who earned a lengthy New York Times profile featuring a moody, gray sweater/frayed jeans, self-portrait. If Jens Forster, with his Art Garfunkel vibe, plays his cards right, he could score a Rolling Stone cover.
But he will have to play by the Stapel playbook. “I am in therapy every week. I hate myself,” Stapel tells the NYT guy. Self-hatred is good, very good, and Forster should definitely go with it, though he obviously shouldn’t use Stapel’s exact words. His larger self-description should, once again, cleave pretty closely to Stapel’s while avoiding obvious borrowing. Here’s Stapel.
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.
The addiction and junkie bit, and the noble quest for beauty bit, are both excellent and should be retained, though again with slightly different wording. Example:
I was, from a young age, more sensitive to the beauty of the world than other people; and as I became older, this sensitivity became – I don’t know – call it a hypersensitivity. To the point where I developed almost what you might call a dependency on beautiful results.
May 30th, 2014 at 12:22PM
“I developed almost what you might call a dependency on beautiful results”….Bernie Madoff (and others!) could have used that angle: “I was more sensitive to the beauty of 22% annual returns than other people, almost a dependency on beautiful results.”