HOW AND WHY SO-CALLED SCIENTISTS, LIKE CLIMATE CHANGE ALARMISTS, TWIST THEIR STUDIES

NYTIMES EXCERPTED BY WUWT:

Story submitted by Bruce Webster

An article in the New York Times chronicles the descent of a sociologist into wholesale fraud. 

It is worth reading the whole article, because I believe it offers insight into some of the pressures, temptations, and self-rationalizations that many scientists struggle with.

Here is one key passage that will likely not surprise anyone here at WUWT (all emphasis in quoted text is mine):

Each case of research fraud that’s uncovered triggers a similar response from scientists. First disbelief, then anger, then a tendency to dismiss the perpetrator as one rotten egg in an otherwise-honest enterprise. But the scientific misconduct that has come to light in recent years suggests at the very least that the number of bad actors in science isn’t as insignificant as many would like to believe. And considered from a more cynical point of view, figures like Hwang and Hauser are not outliers so much as one end on a continuum of dishonest behaviors that extend from the cherry-picking of data to fit a chosen hypothesis — which many researchers admit is commonplace — to outright fabrication.

“Cherry-picking of data” is, of course, not an unknown topic in these parts. But here’s an even more intriguing passage:

Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. 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.

And again:

What the public didn’t realize, he said, was that academic science, too, was becoming a business. “There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition,” he said. “Normal people go to the edge to get that money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman. I am on the road. People are on the road with their talk. With the same talk. It’s like a circus.”

RTWT.