Eugene Delgaudio: "One Big Fraud Now threatens all social psychology"

May 9, 2013

By Michael Cook of mercatornet reports "Scientific studies are used to support controversial social policies like same-sex marriage. But can we rely on them?"

Rush Limbaugh says many of America's liberal researchers do the same thing as this researcher for past fifty years and are not reliable. It is now clear that the entire political or "social" academic structure is riddled with fabrication and false research," says Eugene Delgaudio president of Public Advocate.

The news report goes on to discuss several more noted researchers whom have been shown to be less then perfectly forthcoming with the details of their data. Such as Dirk Smeesters, formerly of Erasmus University in the Netherlands, and Lawrence Sanna, formerly of the University of Michigan.

It says "Even in scientific laboratories Georg Wilhelm Richmann is not a household name. But he ought to be. Richmann was an 18th century Russian scientist who died trying to repeat Benjamin Franklin's famous experiment of attracting lightning to a kite. A ball of lightning travelled down the cord and struck him dead. The first martyr for the cause of science died trying to replicate another scientist's results."

The ability to reproduce the results of an experiment is a key step in the rapid progress that science has made since then. As any undergraduate in science knows, a true scientist observes, hypothesizes, predicts, and tests to reach a conclusion. We can be sure that his conclusion is unbiased and certain, because anyone can replicate it to see if it contains errors.

But what if no one bothers to replicate it? Is it really science?

This is the question which is shaking the whole field of social psychology after a Dutch professor admitted that most of his stellar career - with papers in the world's best journals - was a gigantic con job.

Diederik Stapel, the dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, published dozens of articles based on fraudulent data over 15 years at three universities. He even forged data for the post-graduate students he was supervising, tainting their degrees.