page 53

1
2
3
4
5
6
7 3
8
9
10 A Menagerie of Imposters
11
12 and Truth-Tellers: Diederik
13
14
Stapel and the Crisis
15
16
in Psychology
17
18 Maarten Derksen
19
20
21
22
Introduction
23
24 On 7 September 2011 the career of Diederik Stapel, social psychologist
25 at Tilburg University in the Netherlands came to a sudden end.
26 Twelve days earlier his colleague and friend Marcel Zeelenberg
27 had confronted him with detailed evidence that he had fabricated
28 results, evidence which had been meticulously collected by three
29 young researchers of Stapel’s own research group. Stapel thought
30 he had managed to talk his way out of it, but Zeelenberg informed
31 the vice-chancellor. After failing to convince the vice-chancellor in
32 their first conversation Stapel, with mounting panic, travelled half
33 the country to visit the places where he had supposedly collected
34 his data, in order to construct a plausible story and make sure he
35 got the details right. It was to no avail, and finally, accompanied
36 by a lawyer, Stapel confessed: he had made up data, and had been
37 doing so for many years. His house of cards, as he would later call it,
38 had come tumbling down.1 In retrospect, Stapel’s confession to the
39
40
41 1
For this chronology I  have drawn on Ruud Abma’s De Publicatiefabriek, which
42 contains a detailed history of the Stapel affair (Abma, 2013).

53
page 54 THE IMPOSTER AS SOCIAL THEORY

1 vice-chancellor was a rare moment of order and consensus in a saga

2 that is otherwise characterized by differences of opinion, conflicting
3 stories and a lack of confidence in the discipline of psychology as a
4 whole. While they sat at a table in the vice-chancellor’s home, for a
5 brief instant, there was clarity: Stapel confirmed that the accusations
6 were correct, he had fabricated data, he was a fraud. But as the story
7 hit the press and became national news, questions started to be asked
8 again. A few people rather hopefully speculated that it might be a hoax,
9 perhaps perpetrated by Stapel himself. These fanciful speculations
10 were quickly squashed, but many questions remained. How long
11 had it been going on? How many of his papers were fraudulent?
12 A commission had been created to investigate the matter, but it wasn’t
13 just Stapel who was under scrutiny. The Stapel affair hit psychology
14 at a time when its research practices were already increasingly being
15 examined. A reform movement was emerging that used Facebook
16 and Twitter as its media to discuss the ways that psychologists produce
17 publishable results. Inevitably the question arose to what extent Stapel’s
18 fraud was emblematic of what was starting to be called the ‘crisis
19 of confidence’ in psychology. Was the fact that he had gotten away
20 with fabricating data for so long somehow symptomatic of systemic
21 problems in psychology? Could we trust any of the results collected
22 in the discipline’s journals? Stapel’s imposture fed the suspicion that
23 psychology as a whole was an imposter.
24 ‘Stapel’ became a tool to think with; to reflect on the discipline’s
25 orientation to truth and its truth practices. In this chapter I will describe
26 how ‘Stapel’ fuelled debates about the state of psychology, and how in
27 the process Stapel’s imposture was construed in various ways. I am not
28 concerned here with ‘the truth’ about Stapel or about psychology: my
29 focus is on how, and by whom, different versions of the truth were
30 presented and mobilized. In the process, different roles were invoked and
31 performed: a whole menagerie of imposters and truth-tellers appeared,
32 fakers and those who see through them. I  will describe how these
33 different personages were staged by the actors involved in the Stapel
34 affair. Of particular interest will be the question of how the authority
35 (to tell the truth) is claimed, assigned and contested: who gets to tell the
36 truth about imposture?
37
38
Fabrication
39
40 A few days after Stapel’s confession, on Friday 9 September 2011,
41 vice-chancellor Philip Eijlander formed a commission, charged with
42

54
page 55 A MENAGERIE OF IMPOSTERS AND TRUTH-TELLERS

1 answering two questions.2 The first was relatively straightforward and

2 factual: which of Stapel’s publications were fraudulent? The second
3 question was: how this had been possible? What was Stapel’s modus
4 operandi, and what had facilitated his fraud? Within two months the
5 commission issued an interim report (Levelt et  al, 2011). Helped
6 by Stapel himself, who had supplied the commission with a list of
7 journal articles that, as far as he could remember, relied on falsified
8 or fabricated data, the commission concluded that ‘dozens’ of articles
9 were fraudulent, going back at least to 2004. The commission also
10 promised to publish the full list in its final report.3 Most of the interim
11 report, however, was devoted to the second question: how could this
12 happen? The commission’s answer was twofold. First of all, Stapel was
13 a cunning and cynical imposter, who abused his power and status to
14 trick his colleagues and students. The commission described his usual
15 working methods in great detail. Together with a graduate student,
16 Stapel would design a study that fitted in the student’s overall project.
17 Stapel would do much of the conceptual work, and leave it to the
18 student to prepare the material for the study: stimuli, questionnaires,
19 leaflets with instructions, and so on. Stapel would then load the material
20 in his car, and pretend to drive to one of the schools and colleges where,
21 he explained, he usually collected his data. Then, a few weeks later,
22 he would hand a data set to the grad student, sometimes praising the
23 wonderful results, and together they would write the paper and submit
24 it to a journal. This scheme could only work, the commission added,
25 because Stapel abused his power and prestige to turn his students into
26 unwitting collaborators in the game. The commission claimed that
27 he carefully picked the junior researchers he wanted to work with,
28 and then created a strong bond with them, inviting them to his home,
29 taking them out for dinner or to the theatre. Once part of the inner
30 circle, feeling special, they would not think of raising the alarm. In
31 the rare cases that someone did express doubts about Stapel’s data he
32 would demand trust and respect. According to the committee, Stapel’s
33 demeanour was ‘persuasive and at the same time intimidating’ (Levelt
34
35
36 2
There were in fact three commissions, one for each university where Stapel had
37 worked: University of Amsterdam, University of Groningen and Tilburg University.
38 Their work was coordinated and aggregated by the Levelt Commission, which
39 itself focused on the Tilburg period. I will refer to the combined commission in
40 the singular.
3
The number of retracted papers currently stands at 58. See http://retractiondatabase.
41
org/RetractionSearch.aspx#?auth%3dStapel%252c%2bDiederik%2bA
42

55
page 56 THE IMPOSTER AS SOCIAL THEORY

1 et al, 2011: 12).4 The commission thought that Stapel’s cunning and

2 cynical manipulations were the main reason his fraud had remained
3 undetected so long, but it also saw a second factor:  the ‘deficient
4 functioning of scientific critique, the keystone of science’ (Levelt et al,
5 2011:  9). The reasoning of the commission was simple:  there was
6 so much that was unlikely and implausible about Stapel’s work that
7 his colleagues should have spotted the fraud much earlier: professors
8 seldom do their own data collection; the experiments were far too
9 complicated to be done in classrooms, under the supervision of
10 teachers; there were often statistically unlikely patterns in the data;
11 and, perhaps worst of all, his results tended to be ‘too beautiful to be
12 true’ (Levelt et al, 2011: 16). His hypotheses were always confirmed,
13 usually with large effect sizes. Ironically, ‘too beautiful to be true’ was
14 precisely how his colleagues sometimes complimented him on his
15 results. They didn’t notice the statistical oddities and the questionable
16 research practices. The commission concluded that ‘scientific criticism
17 had not functioned adequately’ in this case, and questioned whether
18 this was a symptom of a broader problem in the scientific culture of
19 psychology and social psychology in particular (Levelt et al, 2011: 17).
20 In its final report, this broader problem was formulated as ‘a research
21 culture that is too much focused on uncritically confirming one’s
22 ideas and finding interesting but theoretically superficial ad hoc results’
23 (Commissie Levelt et al, 2012: 47). The commission gave its final report
24 the title ‘Failing science’.5 Thus, the commission had identified two
25 imposters: the cynical, manipulative fraud Stapel, and the fake science
26 social psychology. These are two different kinds of imposter. Social
27 psychology’s problem, as the commission described it, was not its
28 cynicism or its cunning, but rather the reverse. Social psychologists are
29 too credulous, too easily impressed by beautiful results, whether their
30 own or those of others. Real science, they argued, requires a critical
31 attitude. A ‘ground rule’ in science, the commission explained, is that
32 research has to be conducted in such a way that hypotheses can be
33 falsified (Commissie Levelt et al, 2012: 48). In Stapel’s work, however,
34 there was a clear ‘verification bias’: negative results were suppressed, and
35 a variety of tricks was employed to make results statistically significant.
36 To the commission’s surprise, colleagues of Stapel indicated that these
37 were normal practices in the field. Everything seemed to be geared to
38 the confirmation of hypotheses and the production of an ‘interesting,
39
40
41 4
All translations from Dutch to English are my own.
42 5
‘Fail’ is an intransitive verb here. ‘A science that fails’, not ‘someone fails science’.

56
page 57 A MENAGERIE OF IMPOSTERS AND TRUTH-TELLERS

1 beautiful, short and pithy story’ (Commissie Levelt et al, 2012: 53).

2 The commission could only conclude that ‘at all levels there was a
3 general neglect of fundamental scientific standards and methodological
4 requirements’ (Commissie Levelt et al, 2012: 53), a research culture
5 that it denoted (in English) as ‘sloppy science’ (Commissie Levelt et al,
6 2012: 47). The commission was nevertheless careful to emphasize that
7 only Stapel bore responsibility for the fraud. The failing science around
8 him offered no excuse for what he had done. Legal considerations may
9 have played a role in drawing this strict distinction, which is somewhat
10 at odds with the tenor of the report. This meant that the relation
11 between the two imposters that the commission had constructed was
12 a bit unstable.
13 The commission’s authority as truth-teller rested on the enormous
14 amount of information it had gathered in its many conversations with
15 Stapel’s colleagues and students, as well as the investigative work of the
16 statisticians who had checked all his analyses. In addition the report
17 had a suitably official character, with chairman Levelt ceremonially
18 handing over a copy to vice-chancellor Eijlander at a press conference.
19 The ‘law’ that it applied was the commonly accepted definition
20 of scientific fraud:  fabrication or falsification of data.6 There was,
21 however, also a more implicit set of rules at play, particularly in its
22 pronouncements about the research culture in social psychology. The
23 commission presented itself as a representative of ‘real science’, referring
24 to, for example, ‘the fundamental rules of proper scientific research’
25 (Commissie Levelt et al, 2012: 47). However, whereas the commission’s
26 investigation of the extent of Stapel’s fraud was unanimously praised,
27 the commission’s authority to speak for science and criticize social
28 psychology was quickly challenged.
29
30
Not unique
31
32 The response from social psychologists was swift.7 The European
33 Association of Social Psychology (EASP), which put out a statement two
34 weeks after the Levelt report was published, praised the commission’s
35 detailed investigation of Stapel’s fraud and its meticulous reconstruction
36 of ‘the world of deception and influence that Stapel had set up around
37 him’ (The Executive Committee of the European Association of
38 Social Psychology, 2012). However, it labelled as ‘defamatory’ and
39
40
41 6
Plagiarism is also considered fraud, but Stapel had not committed plagiarism.
42 7
See Hintum (2012) for other reactions similar to the ones I describe here.

57
page 58 THE IMPOSTER AS SOCIAL THEORY

1 ‘insulting’ the commission’s conclusions about the research culture in

2 social psychology. The EASP turned the commission’s condescending
3 reproach of sloppy science back on itself: to accuse an entire field of
4 pervasive malpractice on the basis of an investigation of one man’s
5 fraud was itself unscientific. It smacked of the kind of verification
6 bias that the commission accused social psychologists of. Moreover,
7 singling out social psychology as a sloppy science would only have been
8 warranted had the commission compared research practices in social
9 psychology with those in other sciences. In fact, the EASP added, just
10 such a comparison had been published shortly before by three former
11 colleagues of Stapel. Based on an extensive review of the literature on
12 scientific fraud they concluded that there is no evidence that fraud is
13 more prevalent in social psychology than in other disciplines (Stroebe
14 et  al, 2012). The authors also countered the criticism that Stapel’s
15 imposture had been so blatant that other social psychologists should
16 have detected it long ago. This was hindsight bias: the improbabilities
17 and defects in Stapel’s work might seem obvious now, but that is only
18 because it was now known that he was a fraud. Besides, peer review
19 and replication, often touted as the mechanisms of scientific self-
20 correction (including by the commission), rarely catch out frauds.
21 The self- correcting nature of science, the authors stated boldly,
22 is ‘a myth’ (Stroebe et  al, 2012:  670).Writing in the Times Higher
23 Education Supplement Stephen Gibson, honorary secretary of the British
24 Psychological Society (BPS), followed much the same track. He too
25 commended the commission for its detailed scrutiny of Stapel’s papers,
26 but objected strongly to its indictment of social psychology. Again,
27 Stroebe et al’s survey of fraud in science provided the main argument,
28 namely that social psychology seems to be no worse in this respect
29 than other fields. Gibson further underlined that point by referring
30 to the work of sociologists of science like Bruno Latour and Harry
31 Collins, ‘who have shown the contingent and “messy” nature of
32 practice across all scientific disciplines’ (Gibson, 2012). Such work is
33 needed to correct the commission’s ‘careless implication of “unique”
34 deficiencies’ (Gibson, 2012).
35 Thus, the EASP and the BPS tried to prevent Stapel’s fraud
36 from tainting the entire discipline in two ways:  by re-emphasizing
37 Stapel’s cunning deception, and by reassigning the problems that the
38 commission had localized in social psychology to all of science.8 Like
39 the Levelt commission, the EASP and the BPS drew on ‘science’ for
40
41
42 8
I thank David Moats for this point.

58
page 59 A MENAGERIE OF IMPOSTERS AND TRUTH-TELLERS

1 the legitimation of their claims, but whereas the commission had based
2 its judgement on a normative philosophy of science, the defence of
3 the social psychologists rested on empirical studies of scientific practice.
4 The EASP had enough confidence in its strategy to call on the
5 Levelt commission to ‘amend its report’, but no such correction was
6 forthcoming (The Executive Committee of the European Association
7 of Social Psychology, 2012). In a brief rejoinder, the commission
8 acknowledged that it had not compared social psychology’s problematic
9 research culture with that of other disciplines (Drenth et al, 2013).
10 That had simply not been part of its brief. The fact remained that
11 there were problems in social psychology. The commission was happy
12 to point out that many psychologists shared its concerns about the
13 state of the field, and were giving the issue of scientific integrity the
14 attention it deserved. If their report about Stapel’s fraud had increased
15 vigilance in the field, the commission’s efforts had not been in vain
16 (Drenth et al, 2013).
17
18
Derailment
19
20 After his confession, little had been heard from Stapel himself until
21 the publication of the commission’s final report a year later. Stapel
22 appeared on TV, reading a short statement (Omroep Brabant, 2012).
23 He said he had remained quiet the previous year in order not to hinder
24 the work of the commission, but he was now ready to tell his story.
25 He announced that later that week he would publish a book in which
26 he tried to answer the many questions that his actions had raised, for
27 himself as well as for others.
28 In the book, titled Derailment (Ontsporing in Dutch) (Stapel, 2012)
29 Stapel meticulously dissects himself and the research culture in which
30 he had worked in an effort to explain how he could have gone off
31 the rails so spectacularly. He describes in detail how his imposture
32 worked, and what his life as an imposter was like. The image of Stapel
33 which appears is subtly different from that which the commission had
34 sketched. Whereas the commission (as well as the EASP and BPS)
35 saw a cynical manipulator, Stapel presents himself as a tragic, hapless
36 figure, barely in control of his actions. First of all, Stapel contends that
37 the process had all been far more difficult than the commission had
38 thought:  even nonexistent research takes time. Stapel had to make
39 space in his busy schedule for this ‘research’. So every now and then
40 he would reserve a day in his agenda and he would disappear. He
41 recounts how he would get in his car and drive around until enough
42 time had passed for the research to have taken place. On one of those

59
page 60 THE IMPOSTER AS SOCIAL THEORY

1 days he actually drove to the supposed location of the study. He went

2 to Rotterdam to ‘collect data’ in a busy shopping street, parked his car,
3 sat on a bench for a couple of hours staring vacantly at the shoppers,
4 and drove back home.
5 Moreover, the procedure left Stapel with a lot of superfluous
6 material that somehow had to disappear. He would dump the piles of
7 questionaires in recycling bins. For one study he had used M&Ms as
8 part of the experiment. To get rid of the candy he regularly transferred
9 a bag from a box in his garage to the glove compartment of his car
10 and ate it himself, on the road, adding to his middle-aged weight
11 problem. Finally, the numbers that went into the spreadsheet had to
12 make sense. The best way to do that was to put himself in the shoes
13 of his nonexistent participants and imagine how they would answer
14 the questions. Even so, his data sets still contained many statistical
15 improbabilities. Over the years, increasingly disgusted with himself,
16 Stapel explained that he became ever sloppier and started to make
17 more and more mistakes, for instance duplicating whole rows of the
18 spreadsheet from one data set to another.
19 Thus, passing as a scientist involved doing much of what scientists
20 do anyway: preparing the study, making time to collect data, analysing
21 the results, writing the manuscript, and so on. In practical terms almost
22 everything about Stapel’s research was real except for the source of the
23 numbers in the data files. Arguably, Stapel was more concerned with
24 ‘the reality’ of the research than his peers, because his deceit required
25 him to attend to details about methodology and human nature that
26 other researchers do not have to worry about because they are a
27 taken-for-granted part of doing research. Passing as a scientist also
28 required special attention to the claims that his Excel sheets provided
29 evidence for. Stapel’s hypotheses tended to be interesting, sometimes
30 even eye-catching, but always plausible given the accepted knowledge
31 in the field. They were interesting, and thus publishable, extensions of
32 existing ideas. They were never revolutionary. They attracted attention,
33 but not too much. This quality protected his claims from any intense
34 scrutiny, but this was also the result of Stapel’s attitude towards research.
35 In Derailment he explains that he was always looking for ideas that ‘had
36 to be true’. He seems to have had a good eye for what had to be true,
37 because some of his fraudulent studies have been succesfully replicated.9
38 In some cases at least, Stapel had managed to make up the truth. As
39
40
41 9
According to Stapel himself (2012: 177), though it is not clear what studies he is
42 referring to.

60
page 61 A MENAGERIE OF IMPOSTERS AND TRUTH-TELLERS

1 he describes in his autobiography, this attitude that some ideas have to

2 be true was one of the root causes of his misconduct. If the data did
3 not conform to what had to be true, then obviously the data were at
4 fault and had to be corrected. In the book, Stapel describes a key scene
5 in 2004, presenting it as the moment that he became a fraud. He sits
6 in his office looking at a data set. He is worried, because lately none
7 of his studies has yielded statistically significant results, and journals
8 have been rejecting his papers (Stapel, 2012: 165). This data set does
9 not give the expected and required p-values either. He closes the
10 door, changes a couple of numbers, then quickly undoes the changes,
11 shocked by what he just did. Then he changes the numbers again,
12 runs the analysis, and gets statistically significant results. ‘[T]he world
13 had become logical again’ (Stapel, 2012: 145). Changing numbers in a
14 data set counts as falsification, which is commonly defined as fraud in
15 academic regulations regarding scientific integrity. Formally speaking,
16 Stapel had crossed a boundary, but in the book he also emphasizes the
17 continuity with his earlier research practices. He had long been working
18 in a grey zone, as he put it, using more or less dubious tactics to make
19 his results look better and achieve statistical significance. So had his
20 colleagues, he writes: how else could their results be so pretty? Like
21 the Levelt commission, Stapel paints a picture of social psychology as
22 a ‘sloppy science’, in which the rules of proper science are bent in the
23 interest of verifying theories and furthering careers.
24 Stapel also construes another continuity:  he had long harboured
25 this attitude towards truth  – that some things have to be true. He
26 describes how, as a student, he became fascinated by theory:  by
27 the various explanations for behavioural phenomena, and how, by
28 diligent and detailed conceptual work, these puzzles could be solved
29 and a logical, coherent picture of reality be created.10 He would draw
30 theoretical schemes with boxes and arrows between them on sheets
31 of paper that he stuck together. He would lie awake at night mulling
32 over theoretical ideas. He would sit behind his desk for eight, nine
33 hours at a stretch solving theoretical riddles, in total flow, feeling
34 high, ‘tripping in my own universe of ideas, concepts, and cross-
35 connections’ (Stapel, 2012: 139). His empirical work, on the other
36 hand, was quick and slap-dash, favouring simple questionnaires that
37 often combined items testing multiple hypotheses. ‘Guerilla research’,
38 he called it (Stapel, 2012: 141). Moreover, these experiments served
39
40
41 10
Hub Zwart (2017: 233) speaks of Stapel’s ‘epistemological desire’ for order in a
42 messy world.

61
page 62 THE IMPOSTER AS SOCIAL THEORY

1 to confirm ideas, not to falsify them. ‘Whatever way we arrive at

2 our theories and hypotheses, the experiments and tests we design are
3 made to verify, not to falsify our conjectures’ (Stapel, 2000: 6).11 Stapel
4 describes how, as his career progressed, there was an important change
5 in his orientation to truth and his fascination with order. As a young
6 researcher he had been convinced that social psychology is a science
7 of exceptions, full of little theories – theorettes, he called them – that
8 are only conditionally true (Stapel, 2012: 153). In social psychology,
9 everything is situational, everything specific. His mission was to
10 bring order and structure, by connecting all the pieces of the puzzle.
11 Integration was the goal (Stapel, 2000). Over the years, however, it
12 became clear to him that the complicated models he produced were
13 not popular with his colleagues. They mocked him behind his back
14 for his byzantine theoretical constructions. Perhaps his theories were
15 complete, but they were also imposible to understand and, worse than
16 that, boring. Stapel began to notice that, while he was respected, he
17 was not a star. People didn’t stay around after his conference talks, he
18 was never invited to give keynote lectures. As he describes it in his
19 book, his narcissistic hunger for admiration drove him to pursue a new
20 kind of order: that of simplicity.
21 What remained the same was his conception of truth as ideal,
22 transcendent. Truth had quasi-religious overtones for Stapel. A theory
23 that connected results in a way that made sense and created order
24 was ‘beautiful’ as well as ‘logical’. Stapel notes that he used to have a
25 reproduction of Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation in his office. It is a
26 painting that moves him because, he writes, it depicts the momentary
27 connection of ‘the heavenly, the whole, with the earthly, the broken
28 and unfinished’ (Stapel, 2012: 277). He claimes to feel a similar emotion
29 when science manages to give meaning and structure to the earthly
30 chaos, and so gives us ‘rest and insight’ (Stapel, 2012: 277).
31 Given this orientation to abstract order, logic and beauty, this
32 obsession with what has to be true, it is not suprising that from early
33 on in his career Stapel employed a number of tricks to make the data
34 conform to his theories: selectively removing outliers, only reporting
35 the measures that showed an effect, leaving out groups or conditions
36 that hadn’t worked, and so on, all in the interest of showing evidence
37 for what had to be true because it was so logical and beautiful. Falsifying
38 data points was simply the next step.
39
40
41 11
Zwart (2017) reads this as an expression of his budding disenchantment with
42 the discipline.

62
page 63 A MENAGERIE OF IMPOSTERS AND TRUTH-TELLERS

1 Although he emphasizes that he alone was responsible for his actions,

2 Stapel’s explanation for his misconduct highlights the interaction
3 between a competitive academic culture and his own personality.
4 He had learnt early on that he had to score points in order to get
5 ahead: publish or perish but also sell or sink. Modern scientists, he
6 writes, are ‘sales managers who have to reach objective publication
7 targets’ (Stapel, 2012: 138). He adds, however, that such targets and the
8 praise one receives when one reaches them are particularly attractive
9 for people who lack self-confidence, such as himself. ‘Clear applause
10 feels good, especially if you’re not sure whether what you do and who
11 you are is worth anything’ (Stapel, 2012: 138). He doesn’t use the term,
12 but Stapel appears to have suffered from imposter syndrome.
13 Writing about the later stages of his derailment, Stapel describes
14 himself as a junkie, addicted to a toxic mix of beautiful truth and the
15 admiration he received for his beautiful results. As the years went on
16 he took ever more risks to get his hit. In his account he emerges as
17 a tragic imposter: not a comical con man like Giacomo Casanova or
18 Frank Abagnale (depicted in the movie Catch Me If You Can). In his
19 book he emphatically accepts full responsibility, but he also emphasizes
20 how addicted he was. And he was not a happy addict, rather he presents
21 himself as conflicted, tormented by guilt and shame.
22 Stapel dealt with this conflict by avoiding it. He never stayed long
23 at research meetings where his students presented their work based on
24 his fake data, and afterwards he would take a long walk or lock himself
25 in his room, so that he could shift his attention to other, new projects
26 and repress the mounting desperation. He avoided talking about his
27 experiments with colleagues, preferring to discuss theory. And as the
28 world he created with his data became ever more orderly and beautiful,
29 he started to believe in it more and more. ‘I could only survive by
30 keeping it to myself and strongly believing in it’ (Stapel, 2012: 177).
31 He describes it as an intensely lonely existence.
32
33
Imposters and wannabes
34
35 In Derailment, Stapel presented himself as an imposter who had turned
36 truth-teller. He could tell the truth because he had lived it: he knew
37 what it took to be a scientific fraud, and he knew the research culture
38 of social psychology inside out. Now that he no longer had to keep
39 up the pretence and had nothing more to lose, he could tell the
40 unvarnished truth. To underline his transformation into truth-teller,
41 he did not use the name under which he had published his scientific
42 articles (Diederik A. Stapel) but instead called himself ‘Diederik Stapel’,

63
page 64 THE IMPOSTER AS SOCIAL THEORY

1 adding ‘[t]hat’s someone else’ (Stapel, 2012: 292). The persuasiveness

2 of this performance depended on balancing identity (he was the Stapel
3 who had committed fraud, he knew what it was like) with difference
4 (he was no longer a fraud, and he could now speak the truth freely).
5 Responses to this narrative were decidedly mixed. Although the
6 national media were fascinated by the man behind the fraud, many of
7 Stapel’s Dutch colleagues were disgusted and simply refused to read
8 the book. To them he remained an imposter, not a truth-teller. In my
9 own department someone had photocopied the book, so that no one
10 would have to buy it and Stapel would not make any money from it.
11 Those who did comment on the book derided what they saw as the
12 author’s narcissism, a term that was also used in several book reviews
13 in the national press (Brussen, 2012; Somers, 2012).
14 What attracted more attention was Stapel’s critique of academia
15 and the research practices in his field. Developmental psychologist
16 Willem Koops wrote a scathing book review in which he mocked
17 the autobiographical parts of the book – ‘rather uninteresting private
18 information’ – and advised the author to try his luck at writing novels
19 (Koops, 2013). But whereas Stapel’s self-presentation merely merited
20 derision, Koops was livid about Stapel’s description of systemic
21 problems in the discipline. His suggestion that questionable research
22 practices are common in psychology, that all psychologists are imposters
23 like him, was nothing but a slanderous attempt to shift the blame.
24 Others, however, saw Stapel’s revelations about the way he and his
25 colleagues practised science as confirmation that there were serious
26 problems in academia and social psychology in particular. Stapel had
27 become entranced by the ‘competitive world of glitter’ in academia,
28 and without fundamental reforms there will be other fraud cases,
29 wrote biochemist Frank Miedema (2013). Psychologists Denny
30 Borsboom and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers called Derailment ‘devastating,
31 and a must-read for anyone with an interest in science’ (Borsboom and
32 Wagenmakers, 2013). They noted that Stapel’s book underscored the
33 conclusions of the Levelt commission, and that it suggested that the
34 problems were actually wider than just social psychology.
35 Cognitive neuroscientist Chris Chambers devoted a chapter to fraud
36 in his book The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A Manifesto for Reforming
37 the Culture of Scientific Practice (Chambers, 2017). He too portrayed
38 Stapel as an extreme symptom of a much wider problem, rather than
39 setting him apart as an individual rotten apple. Drawing on Stapel’s
40 autobiography he noted that data fabrication had simply been ‘an
41 extra step’ after years of employing questionable research practices to
42 score publishable results (Chambers, 2017: 102). Chambers challenged

64
page 65 A MENAGERIE OF IMPOSTERS AND TRUTH-TELLERS

1 his readers to define the distinction between fraud (fabrication and

2 falsification of data) and questionable research practices such as
3 discarding studies that do not confirm the hypothesis. ‘Unless we define
4 scientific fraud narrowly as (only) the kind of extreme fabrication
5 perpetrated by Stapel, it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the
6 blackest of fraudulent acts from a continuum of dishonest practices at
7 the individual and group level’ (Chambers, 2017: 106). Stapel’s actions
8 had been extraordinary, but, Chambers notes, many psychologists
9 are to some extent engaging in imposture. It’s even possible that they
10 don’t know that what they are doing is wrong.12 In this interpretation,
11 which very much resembles the conclusion of the Levelt commission,
12 psychologists are not low-grade imposters, less extreme versions of
13 Stapel, rather they are wannabes: people who have fooled themselves
14 into thinking that they are doing science, but do not understand what
15 science really involves.
16
17
Transparency
18
19 As the Levelt commission’s final report had noted, ‘Stapel’ was not the
20 only sign that something was deeply wrong in psychology. There were
21 many other events in 2011 and 2012, two extraordinarily bad years
22 for psychology, that seemed to point to the same conclusion. It was
23 enough to make people speak of a ‘crisis’ in psychology. A community
24 of reformers emerged, that assembled on Twitter and Facebook to
25 discuss the problems in the field and how to solve them.13 They argue
26 that academia has become extremely competitive, and researchers are
27 under pressure to produce as much ‘output’ as they can, preferably
28 in high-impact journals so that their papers will get cited more.14
29 Journals, in order to boost their impact factor, prefer papers that
30 report interesting, unexpected, ‘sexy’ results, that will attract readers
31 who will then cite those papers. Researchers must therefore produce
32 such results in order to have a chance of publication, and when their
33 experiments do not ‘work’, they may wittingly or unwittingly resort
34
35
36 12
Reflecting on Stapel’s autobiography, biological psychologist and methodologist
37 James Heathers proposed that researchers fiddling with the numbers in order to
38 get significant results are mostly people who ‘manage to bullshit themselves’.
39 They ‘try options until something works. And when it works, it must be right,
40
because that’s what they were expecting!’ (Heathers, 2014). In other words, they
are incompetent rather than malicious.
41 13
See chapter 9 of Derksen (2017) for a brief history of the crisis.
42 14
See for example Nosek et al (2012) and the other papers in that special issue.

65
page 66 THE IMPOSTER AS SOCIAL THEORY

1 to questionable research practices. As a consequence, journals are

2 littered with unreliable results. Since journals are not interested in
3 replication studies (too boring) these false claims never get corrected.
4 What is needed, the reformers suggest, is first of all a saner incentive
5 structure in science:  less emphasis on quantity, more on quality of
6 publications. Secondly, the importance of replication studies should be
7 recognized. Although replication is not an instrument to detect fraud,
8 as Stroebe et al (2012) have stressed, reformers do see it as essential to
9 determine the reliability of results. Thirdly, the statistical techniques
10 that are prevalent in the discipline must be examined. Problems with
11 null hypothesis significance testing in particular has been the topic
12 of intense debate, and Bayesian approaches are often put forward as
13 an alternative. But the overriding theme in all the proposals of the
14 reformers is transparency. Reformers advocate opening up the research
15 process in ways which facilitate collaboration but also mutual scrutiny.
16 Sharing the data of one’s study for example can be done via an online
17 platform such as the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io) and
18 allows others to use this data for other projects, but also to check
19 whether re-analysis yields the same results. Another example of this
20 coveillance function of transparency is pre-registration. In order to
21 assure other researchers that the hypothesis tested in a paper is really
22 the one that the researcher set out to test, and not a ‘hypothesis’
23 fitted to the data after they were known, researchers can register their
24 hypotheses on the Open Science Framework (or similar platforms)
25 before they start collecting their data. Sceptics can later check the date
26 of the registration to see whether the hypothesis conforms to the one
27 described in the published paper.
28 For reformers, an important function of transparency is therefore to
29 prevent imposture and keep researchers honest. Requirements such as
30 pre-registration and data sharing make deception, if not impossible,
31 then at least more difficult. Advocates, in this context, often make a
32 distinction between science and ‘story telling’. As Nosek et al wrote
33 in an influential paper: ‘The current default practice is to tell a good
34 story by reporting findings as if the research had been planned that
35 way’ (Nosek et  al., 2012:  625). As they note, this was in fact the
36 explicit advice in a famous book chapter by social psychologist Daryl
37 Bem (2004). The conventional view of science is that researchers first
38 derive hypotheses from theory, then do an experiment to test these
39 hypotheses, and finally analyse the data to see whether or not the
40 hypotheses are confirmed. What you should do, however, Bem advised
41 his readers, is the reverse: look closely at the data first, see if there are
42 interesting patterns, and ‘try to reorganize the data to bring them into

66
page 67 A MENAGERIE OF IMPOSTERS AND TRUTH-TELLERS

1 bolder relief ’ (Bem, 2004: 187). Having crafted an interesting result,

2 you should then construct a ‘compelling framework’ through which
3 to present it (Bem, 2004: 188). No one is interested in the actual run
4 of events in your study, Bem warned his readers: what people want to
5 know is what you have learned from your data.
6 Although reformers strongly object to Bem’s advice to beginning
7 social scientists, at the same time they recognize that a scientific paper
8 is always to some extent a story (Vazire, 2014). There is always a
9 tension between faithfully reporting the research process on the one
10 hand, and not burdening the reader with all the dead ends and a messy,
11 unstructured heap of findings on the other. A similar tension occurs
12 with respect to the frankness that reformers advocate. To them, the
13 ideal scientist is the opposite of the imposter Stapel: whereas Stapel kept
14 to himself as much as possible and avoided discussion about his work,
15 reformers see science as an essentially open, transparent enterprise, in
16 which collaboration and mutual criticism go hand in hand – what Karl
17 Popper once called ‘friendly-hostile collaboration’ (Popper, 2002: 489;
18 Derksen, 2019). But how can scientists practically work together in a
19 manner that is both friendly and hostile? How to marry critique and
20 community? In 2014, for example, there was a row over the replication
21 of a study by psychologist Simone Schnall and colleagues (Schnall
22 et al, 2008) which had failed to find the original effect (Johnson et al,
23 2014). Schnall was extremely upset by the way some of her colleagues
24 responded on social media.
25
26 There now is a recognized culture of ‘replication
27 bullying’:  Say anything critical about replication efforts
28 and your work will be publicly defamed in emails, blogs
29 and on social media, and people will demand your research
30 materials and data, as if they are on a mission to show that
31 you must be hiding something. (Schnall, 2014a)
32
33 She thought the Stapel affair had fostered a ‘crime control mindset’
34 in psychology, where failed replications are taken to be an indication
35 that the original results were due to questionable research practices
36 or outright fraud. In reality, she said, failures to reproduce results are
37 often due to a lack of expertise in that field of study – as had been
38 the case in the replication of her own work. Schall stressed that you
39 cannot ‘crowd-source’ science, you need real experts (Schnall, 2014b).
40 Schnall’s mentioning of expertise shows that the affair was not only
41 about the tone of the attacks, but also about authority. The status of
42 the reformers as truth-tellers derives in part from the very problems

67
page 68 THE IMPOSTER AS SOCIAL THEORY

1 they identify, including failed replications. Every time the results of

2 an earlier study cannot be reproduced it is, at least potentially, further
3 support for the reformers’ claims about the problems in the discipline.
4 At issue is not only questions about the role of replication in sorting
5 truth from falsehood, but also who can decide on the interpretation
6 of specific replication failures. If the latter requires special expertise,
7 only available to researchers in that particular field or even in that
8 particular line of research, the authority of the reformers is severely
9 affected. They would in fact become imposters themselves, loudly but
10 falsely pretending to be experts.
11
12
Thinking with imposters
13
14 In the discussion about the Stapel affair, and the problematic research
15 practices in psychology more generally, a range of imposters and truth-
16 tellers have emerged. The first one is the simplest: Stapel was a cynical,
17 manipulative con man, who pulled off his deception by tricking his
18 students and co-authors. This was the imposter described in the Levelt
19 report, and it has remained the figure that is most prominent in the
20 public perception of the affair. Stapel, on the other hand, presented
21 himself as a tragic persona, ensnared by his own imposture, addicted
22 to its successes and unable to quit. He was responsible for his crimes,
23 but at the same time a victim of circumstances. In an academic culture
24 of publish or perish he had taken a wrong turn in order not to perish,
25 and never had the strength to find the way back. This figure is more
26 complex than the first, and it has not been received as well as the first.
27 This imposter, moreover, does not offer a straightforward explanation of
28 what happened – Stapel has related how people keep asking him why he
29 did it, even after he tells them his story (Stapel and Dautzenberg, 2014).
30 A third imposter figure can be found in social psychology depicted as
31 the wannabe scientific discipline in the Levelt commission. This is a
32 common trope: physicist Richard Feynman (1974), for example, once
33 called psychology a ‘cargo cult science’, one that tries to mimic the
34 appearance of true science (physics, of course) in the hope of getting
35 similarly impressive results. This persona was vigorously rejected by
36 social psychologists, but has become a common fixture in discussions
37 among reformers about the deplorable state of psychology. This is a
38 somewhat comical imposter, a clueless phony who is unaware of its own
39 fakeness. These imposters have been joined by their converse: several
40 kinds of truth-tellers have made their appearance in the Stapel affair
41 and the larger crisis that it is a part of. The whistleblower is the
42 mirror figure of the cynical imposter: the good guy/girl who unmasks

68
page 69 A MENAGERIE OF IMPOSTERS AND TRUTH-TELLERS

1 the evil pretender. Whereas the imposter abuses his/her power, the
2 whistleblower speaks truth to power. The three whistleblowers who
3 revealed Stapel’s fraud have been universally praised for their courage
4 and tenacity. Whistleblowers tell a truth that is inconvenient, not just
5 to the imposter, but also to those in power more generally. These three
6 (students and post-docs), in fact, have preferred to remain anonymous
7 for fear of damaging their careers.15 Recently several reformers have
8 taken on a more permanent role as whistleblowers, making uncovering
9 dodgy research and fraud part of their daily work.16 The Levelt
10 commission was appointed as an official truth-teller, charged with
11 investigating the allegations and giving a verdict on what is true and
12 false in Stapel’s work. This part of the commission’s work has been
13 widely praised for its thoroughness and factuality. But the commission’s
14 conclusions regarding ‘the methods and research culture that may have
15 facilitated this infringement’ (Commissie Levelt et al, 2012: 7) have
16 proven to be more controversial. Social psychologists rejected the claim
17 that theirs is a uniquely sloppy science, and turned the commission’s
18 appeal to science against itself: the commission’s own methods had been
19 sloppy, and empirical studies of science have shown that fraud occurs
20 in all fields. Thus, the commission has not been entirely successful in
21 its bid to be a neutral arbiter of truth. Instead, it was briefly pulled into
22 the fray, having to defend its conclusions against critics who themselves
23 claimed to have the backing of science.
24 Other truth-tellers are also visible, albeit more dimly, in the debate
25 about Stapel and the crisis. In the Levelt report, in the discourse of
26 reformers, and in his own book, Stapel is presented as a warning
27 signal:  his fraud, and particularly the long duration of it, are an
28 indication that there is something very wrong in the field that he was
29 a part of. Earlier in 2011 another warning signal had flashed: Daryl
30 Bem, the one who advised young psychologists to construct a good
31 story out of their data, had managed to get a study of precognition
32 published in one of the flagship journals of social psychology (Bem,
33 2011). To the burgeoning reform movement this was a clear indication
34 that something was amiss with the discipline’s standards for publication.
35
36
37 15
Only recently one of them, Yoel Inbar, has made himself known (Inzlicht and
38 Inbar, nd).
16
39 The inquiries of Nick Brown and James Heathers, for example, have led to
40
numerous corrections and retractions, as well as uncovering two cases of fraud
(Marcus and Oransky, 2018). Nick Brown has translated Stapel’s book into English,
41
making the book accessible to an international audience: http://nick.brown.free.
42 fr/stapel/

69
page 70 THE IMPOSTER AS SOCIAL THEORY

1 Like Stapel, Bem functioned as both an imposter and a truth-teller, the

2 very success of their imposture interpreted as a warning signal about the
3 state of the field (unlike Stapel, however, Bem has not repented). A final
4 truth-teller can be glimpsed, very briefly, in Stapel’s book Derailment.
5 When Marcel Zeelenberg confronts Stapel with the accusations of the
6 whistleblowers, Zeelenberg also tells him that ‘all over the country they
7 were gossiping about [him] and when [he] gave a presentation of [his]
8 research, the eyebrows went up in the audience’ (Stapel, 2012: 33).
9 Stapel, he suggests, had been an elephant in the room: a truth seen by
10 everyone, but spoken of by none. The elephant in the room is perhaps
11 the most uncomfortable figure in this menagerie of imposters and
12 truth-tellers, as it points to the complicity of all in the crimes of one.
13 The crisis in psychology that Stapel helped to create has forced
14 psychologists to reflect on honesty and deception, appearance and
15 reality, truth and storytelling, frankness and civility. The various
16 imposters and truth- tellers that made their appearance in these
17 debates imply different ways of drawing such distinctions. The rotten
18 apple has simple boundaries, implies well-defined roles, and suggests
19 a clear explanation. If Stapel was a cynical con man, the people he
20 worked with and the discipline as a whole are blameless victims,
21 and the responsibility for what happened is entirely his. The Stapel
22 affair, however, has resisted categorization as a straightforward case of
23 imposture in a scientific culture devoted to truth. Yes, Stapel was a
24 fraud who made up data sets and presented them as findings. But the
25 fantasies he peddled were almost real, never too surprising lest they
26 raise suspicion, and in some cases reproducible in conventional studies.
27 Stapel tried and sometimes succeeded in making up the truth, raising
28 uncomfortable questions about the relation between truth and fiction
29 in psychology. Moreover, the way he worked was arguably not all that
30 different from the common research practices in his field. He was an
31 extreme, he had drifted into the black on a grey scale where many
32 of his colleagues where not exactly lily white either. If questionable
33 research practices are rife, imposture becomes a matter of degree, and
34 loses its distinctness.
35 The response of reformers has been to create an infrastructure that
36 facilitates and enforces openness. To some extent their discourse is
37 structured by the familiar oppositions of truth versus fiction and the
38 like. Reformers would really like to redraw the distinctions that in their
39 view have become blurred in psychology. Transparency, they argue,
40 will allow us to distinguish exploratory from confirmatory research,
41 proper hypothesis testing from p-hacking, and reproducible results
42 from false positives. But in reflecting on cases of fraud and questionable

70
page 71 A MENAGERIE OF IMPOSTERS AND TRUTH-TELLERS

1 research practices, on failed replications, and on the discussion itself,

2 such distinctions are not self-evident. Transparency does not give an
3 unimpeded view of the naked truth, a scientific paper is not simply
4 a report but always also a story, and frankness can itself be a pose that
5 hinders rather than helps the exchange of views.
6 The kinds of imposters and truth-tellers that were constructed and
7 performed in the Stapel affair are common cultural figures, not specific
8 to science or psychology. What does set this case apart, it seems to
9 me, is the extent to which the participants exercised reflexivity (in
10 the sense of seeing one’s self as also potentially subject to claims they
11 make about others). The Levelt commission’s report was perhaps
12 the least reflexive, reporting the facts of the matter as revealed by
13 its investigation, and passing judgement on the basis of principles of
14 scientific method and integrity that it assumed to be generally accepted.
15 But most other interventions in the affair have a reflexive aspect. The
16 EASP and BPS, for example, criticized the methods of the commission
17 as unscientific by its own standards, and referred to several kinds of
18 studies of science, including the literature on scientific fraud and the
19 work of Harry Collins, to relativize the commission’s portrayal of
20 social psychology. The reformers in psychology, for their part, have
21 read the Stapel affair as a case study of problems in their discipline that
22 they have experienced themselves. Moreover, although the solutions
23 they propose are often based on a similar philosophy of science to
24 that of the Levelt commission, an increasing number of philosophical,
25 historical and sociological perspectives on science have been brought
26 to bear on the issue. By far the most reflexive figure in this drama,
27 however, is Stapel himself. Not only has he subjected himself to a
28 painful self-examination, he has, more than anyone else, reflected on
29 the affair itself. He has done so in psychological terms: in Derailment
30 Stapel regularly refers to social psychology to explain his own actions
31 and the reactions of his former colleagues, the press and the public.
32 The book contains a lengthy annotated bibliography detailing all the
33 psychological studies and theories referred to in the chapters. Ironically,
34 some of these theories have since perished in the replication crisis.
35
36
Epilogue
37
38 In the discussion about the state of psychology, Stapel has been good
39 to think with, but, much to his chagrin, few of his colleagues have
40 been willing to talk with him. In 2013 he started a correspondence
41 with novelist, journalist and provocateur Anton Dautzenberg, who
42 had become a bit of an outcast himself after joining an association

71
page 72 THE IMPOSTER AS SOCIAL THEORY

1 of paedophiles, in support of their right to express their desires. The

2 two developed a friendship and started work on a play about reality,
3 fantasy and fiction. Despite their own enthusiasm, most theatres
4 refused to stage their play, citing the controversies surrounding Stapel,
5 Dautzenberg, or both. In the end they gave up, and instead published
6 their correspondence as a book, titled The Fiction Factory (Stapel and
7 Dautzenberg, 2014). Shortly after publication of the book, Dautzenberg
8 and Stapel were both hired by Fontys Academy for Creative Industries,
9 in their mutual home town of Tilburg.17 Stapel was asked to teach
10 about ‘the dark side of fame and success’ (Bartol, 2014).
11 On Retraction Watch, a web site devoted to keeping track of
12 scientific fraud and the retraction of scientific papers in particular, a
13 vigorous debate took place about Stapel’s new job (Marcus, 2014).
14 Most commenters expressed their outrage at the fact that a known
15 fraudster had been given an opportunity to teach and benefit financially.
16 Defending Stapel was a lone poster called ‘Paul’, who argued that
17 Stapel might have valuable lessons to teach about fraud and failure.
18 ‘Paul’ quickly raised suspicion, and the owners of Retraction Watch
19 contacted him at his email address to find out who he was. Eventually
20 Stapel confessed that he was ‘Paul’. He had been ‘sock puppeting’ –
21 internet lingo for using a fake identity online to speak about yourself.
22 One more imposter had been added to the menagerie.
23
24 References
25 Abma, R. (2013) De publicatiefabriek:  over de betekenis van de affaire-
26 Stapel, Vantilt, Nijmegen [[are these the publisher and place of
27 publication details?]].
28 Bartol, R. (2014) ‘Fraudeprofessor Diederik Stapel aan de slag als
29 docent bij Fontys in Tilburg’, Omroep Brabant, 1 October. Available
30 at: https://www.omroepbrabant.nl/nieuws/182539/Fraudeprofessor-
31 Diederik- Stapel- aan- de- slag- als- docent- bij- Fontys- in- Tilburg
32 [Accessed 15 December 2019].
33 Bem, D.J. (2004) ‘Writing the empirical journal article’, in The Compleat
34 Academic:  A Career Guide (2nd edn), Washington, DC:  American
35 Psychological Association, pp 185–219.
36
37
38
39
40 17
When the board of Fontys found out about it a week later, Dautzenberg’s
41
contract was immediately terminated. Stapel quit in solidarity with his friend
42 (Redactie, 2014).

72
page 73 A MENAGERIE OF IMPOSTERS AND TRUTH-TELLERS

1 Bem, D.J. (2011) ‘Feeling the future:  Experimental evidence for

2 anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect’, J. Pers.
3 Soc. Psychol., 100: 407–425.
4 Borsboom, D. and Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2013) ‘Derailed: The Rise
5 and Fall of Diederik Stapel’, The Observer, 27 December. Available
6 at:  https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/derailed-the-
7 rise-and-fall-of-diederik-stapel [Accessed 12 January 2021][[I have
8 formatted the reference as an article, details okay? Also
9 the date on the website is 2012 not 2013, please check and
10 confirm]].
11 Brussen , B. ( 2012 ) ‘Bert Brussen bespreekt:  “De narcistische
12 jammerklacht van Diederik Stapel” ’, Volkskrant, 2 December.
13 Available at: [[please provide link and access date]]
14 Chambers, C. (2017) The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A Manifesto
15 for Reforming the Culture of Scientific Practice, Princeton:  Princeton
16 University Press.
17 Commissie Levelt, Commissie Noort, Commissie Drenth (2012)
18 Falende wetenschap:  De frauduleuze onderzoekspraktijken van sociaal-
19 psycholoog Diederik Stapel , Tilburg University, University of
20 Amsterdam, University of Groningen.
21 Derksen, M. (2017) Histories of Human Engineering: Tact and Technology,
22 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23 Derksen, M. (2019) ‘Putting Popper to work’, Theory Psychol, 29: 449–
24 465. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354319838343
25 Drenth, P.J.D., Levelt, W.J.M. and Noort, E. (2013) ‘Rejoinder to
26 commentary on the Stapel fraud report’, The Psychologist, 26: 80–81.
27 The Executive Committee of the European Association of Social
28 Psychology (2012) ‘Statement EASP on Levelt report’, available
29 at https://sites.uncc.edu/editorethics/wp-content/uploads/sites/
30 17/ 2014/ 07/ Statement- EASP- on- Levelt_ December_ - 2012.pdf
31 [accessed 12 January 2021].
32 Feynman, R.P. (1974) ‘Cargo cult science’, Eng. Sci., 37: 10–13.
33 Gibson, S. (2012) ‘Don’t tar discipline with Stapel brush’, Times
34 Higher Education , 20 December. Available at:  https:// www.
35 timeshighereducation.com/dont-tar-discipline-with-stapel-brush/
36 422194.article [Accessed 12 January 2021].
37 Heathers, J. (2014) ‘Diary of a bad man (Pt. 1)’, James Heathers.
38 Available at: https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/diary-of-a-bad-
39 man-pt-1-a5ccbf595c2c [Accessed 8 May 2018].
40 Hintum, M. van. (2012) ‘Levelt maakt ten onrechte gehakt van ons’,
41 Volkskrant, 15 December. Available at: [[please provide link and
42 access date]]

73
page 74 THE IMPOSTER AS SOCIAL THEORY

1 Inzlicht , M. and Inbar, Y. (2018) ‘The replication crisis gets

2 personal: Two psychologists, four beers, podcast, [[please provide
3 link]].
4 Johnson, D.J., Cheung, F. and Donnellan, M.B. (2014) ‘Does cleanliness
5 influence moral judgments?’ Soc. Psychol., 45: 209–215. https://doi.
6 org/10.1027/1864–9335/a000186
7 Koops, W. (2013) ‘Zijn wij allemaal Diesjes?  – Diederik Stapels
8 dubbelzinnige mea culpa’, Acad. Boekengids , 97 . Available
9 at:  https://www.nederlandseboekengids.com/abg97/ [Accessed 12
10 January 2021].
11 Levelt, W.J.M., Groenhuijsen, M.S. and Hagenaars, J.A.P. (2011)
12 ‘Interim-rapportage inzake door Prof. Dr.  D.A. Stapel gemaakte
13 inbreuk op wetenschappelijke integriteit’, Tilburg: Tilburg University.
14 Marcus, A. (2014) ‘Curtain up on second act for Dutch fraudster
15 Stapel:  College teacher’, Retraction Watch. Available at:  https://
16 retractionwatch.com/ 2014/ 10/ 03/ curtain- up- on- second-
17 act- for- dutch- fraudster- stapel- college- teacher/ [Accessed 15
18 December 2019].
19 Marcus, A. and Oransky, I. (2018) ‘Meet the “data thugs” out to
20 expose shoddy and questionable research’, Sci. Mag, 14 February
21 [[not cited: please cite or delete]].
22 Miedema, F. (2013) ‘Wetenschap op verkeerd spoor’, DUB, 18 January.
23 Available at:  https:// www.dub.uu.nl/ nl/ opinie/ wetenschap- op-
24 verkeerd-spoor [Accessed 12 January 2021].
25 Nosek, B.A., Spies, J.R. and Motyl, M. (2012) ‘Scientific utopia: II.
26 Restructuring incentives and practices to promote truth over
27 publishability’, Perspect. Psychol. Sci., 7: 615–631.
28 Omroep Brabant (2012) ‘Diederik Stapel leest verklaring voor over
29 zijn fraude’, www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.
30 com/watch?v=VA50L-fzExI [Accessed 12 June 2020].
31 Popper, K.R. (2002) The Open Society and Its Enemies (7th edn),
32 London: Taylor & Francis.
33 Redactie (2014) ‘Stapel en Dautzenberg alweer weg bij Fontys
34 Hogeschool’ Volkskrant, 8 October. Available at:  [[please provide
35 link and access date]]
36 Schnall, S. (2014a) ‘An experience with a registered replication project’,
37 Character Context. Available at:  http://www.spspblog.org/simone-
38 schnall-on-her-experience-with-a-registered-replication-project/
39 [Accessed 25 May 2014].
40
41
42

74
page 75 A MENAGERIE OF IMPOSTERS AND TRUTH-TELLERS

1 Schnall, S. (2014b) ‘Social media and the crowd-sourcing of social

2 psychology’, Camb. Embodied Cogn. Emot. Lab. Blog. Available
3 at:  http:// www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/ cece/ blog [Accessed 17
4 February 2015].
5 Schnall , S. , Benton , J. and Harvey, S. ( 2008 ) ‘With a clean
6 conscience:  Cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments’,
7 Psychol. Sci. , 19:  1219– 1222. https:// doi.org/ 10.1111/
8 j.1467-9280.2008.02227.x
9 Somers, M. (2012) ‘Autobiografie Stapel is een narcistisch mea culpa’,
10 NRC Handelsbl, 30 November. Available at: [[please provide link
11 and access date]]
12 Stapel , D.A. ( 2000 ) ‘Moving from f ads and f ashions to
13 integration: Illustrations from knowledge accessibility research’, Eur.
14 Bull. Soc. Psychol., 12: 4–27.
15 Stapel, D. (2012) Ontsporing, Amsterdam: Prometheus.
16 Stapel, D. and Dautzenberg, A. (2014) De fictiefabriek: een bevrijdingsroman
17 in brieven, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Atlas Contact.
18 Stroebe, W., Postmes, T. and Spears, R. (2012) ‘Scientific misconduct
19 and the myth of self-correction in science’, Perspect. Psychol. Sci.,
20 7: 670–688. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612460687
21 Vazire, S. (2014) ‘Life after bem’, Sometimes Im Wrong. Available
22 at:  https://sometimesimwrong.typepad.com/wrong/2014/03/life-
23 after-bem.html [Accessed 13 December 2019].
24 Zwart, H. (2017) Tales of Research Misconduct, Library of Ethics and Applied
25 Philosophy, Cham: Springer International Publishing.
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42

75