Drang naar Samenhang

You are walking into a room. There is a man sitting behind a table. You sit down across from him. The man sits higher than you, which makes you feel relatively powerless. But he gives you a mug of hot coffee. The warm mug makes you like the man a little more. You warm to him  so to speak. He asks you about your relationship with your significant other. You lean on the table. It is wobbly, so you say that your relationship is very stable. You take a sip from the coffee. It is bitter. Now you think the man is a jerk for having asked you about your personal life. Then the man hands you the test. It is attached to a heavy clipboard, which makes you think the test is important. You’re probably not going to do well, because the cover sheet is red. But wait—what a relief!—on the first page is a picture of Einstein! Now you are going to ace the test. If only there wasn’t that lingering smell of the cleaning fluid that was used to sanitize the room. It makes you want to cle...

When I mentioned in yesterday’s post that Diederik Stapel was contemplating writing a blog, the response was not as negative as he and I (as well as one other person I had mentioned this to) had imagined. It is clear that people are still angry at Stapel. But anger is not a very useful emotion at this point. It’s a little bit like “Praying for Boston.” Praying is not really helping anyone (as Richard Dawkins likes to remind us) but it may make people feel good about themselves. By the same token, rightful indignation about Stapel’s fraudulent behavior may make us feel good about ourselves (why, aren’t we ethical?) but is not helping to improve the way we do science. Like everyone else, I was initially angry at Stapel. Well, first I was bewildered at the depth and the scope of his fraud and then came the anger. Because everyone else around me was also angry, I noticed that I was starting to get a little less angry. (Maybe there is a social psychological theory that can expla...

On April 1, I received an email from “Diederik Stapel” sent from a gmail address. Because of the date, I thought a former graduate student was pulling a prank on me. I had played a joke on her last year by using a fake gmail address and pretending to be an editor (well, I am an editor but I pretended to be a different one). I thought this was her getting back at me so my response was “Nice try, Lisa. What’s the date again?” I received a response that showed some irritation about my lack of seriousness and responsiveness. Still thinking that it was a prank and that my former student was getting desperate because I wasn’t buying it, I then decided to wait until after April 1 to see what would happen. If the messages were somehow not from my student, then I would surely receive another one after April 1. On April 3 I did indeed receive another email from Diederik Stapel to which I wrote a serious response. Stapel wanted to meet with me because I had “a refreshing persp...

There has been much discussion recently about the role of pre-publication posting and post-publication review. Do they have any roles to play in scientific communication and, if so, what roles precisely? Let’s start with pre-publication posting. It is becoming more and more common for researchers to post papers online before they are published. There even are repositories for this. Some researchers post unpublished experiments on their own website. To be sure, like everything pre-review posting has its downside, as Brian Nosek recently found out when he encountered one of his own unpublished experiments—that he had posted on his own website—in a questionable open access journal not with himself but with four Pakistani researchers as authors . But the pros may outweigh the cons. In my latest two posts I described a replication attempt we performed of a study by Vohs and Schooler (2008). Tania Lombrozo commented on my posts, calling them an example of p...