Uri Simonsohn fails to get the postmodern simulacrum memo.

… but it’s pretty clear that there are at least two groups of clever people out there actively checking your letters and numbers, your words and your music, your alpha and omega. So don’t be paranoid, but look sharp.

There are all those Germans with their plagiarism-detection websites… They’ve taken down a defense minister and many other high-ranking people and they’re definitely still at it.

And then there are statisticians like Uri Simonsohn. Uri’s a young Wharton professor who checks out your numbers and on finding them bogus destroys your career.

That may sound harsh, but do we really want social psychologists feeding us all sorts of bullshit all the time and gaining fancy professorships thereby? I don’t think people should be rewarded for taking advantage of our propensity to believe anything.

Via her reader, Seelye, UD learns of the latest iteration of way-bogus psychology scholarship.

She’s named Francesca Giro and she has a really cool website.

We’re all looking for easy steps to a better brighter you, and Happiness + Efficiency experts oblige us with studies showing that, like, thinking of eating meat makes you more boorish and less social. (I read this particular result, from world-famous Diederik Stapel, to Mr UD, who laughed merrily.) H+E experts (Dan Ariely – a co-author of Francesca Giro’s! – Marc Hauser – who shares with Giro the Harvard affiliation – Jens Förster, etc.) are always flooring us with amazing whodathunkits, and we fall for this shit every single time cuz it comes out of Harvard or cuz we just want to believe it or because we’re thrilled by the weird.

But Uri Simonsohn (a name known to readers of this blog) doesn’t fall for it. At all. He finds discipline-destroying lies enraging, and sets about, with a couple of colleagues, to keep the field reasonably clean through exposure of research fraud. The miscreants make stuff up and manipulate numbers in order to keep generating attention-grabbing amazements and giving amazing TED talks re: the amazements and Uri’s right behind them, running the numbers.

How can we protect ourselves from marauding high-profile psych frauds?

Step One: If something sounds bogus, it’s probably bogus.