Submitted by Peter Markus:
The Mind of a Con Man
By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
New York Times
April 26, 2013
One summer night in 2011, a tall, 40-something professor named Diederik Stapel stepped out of his elegant brick house in the Dutch city of Tilburg to visit a friend around the corner. It was close to midnight, but his colleague Marcel Zeelenberg had called and texted Stapel that evening to say that he wanted to see him about an urgent matter. The two had known each other since the early “™90s, when they were Ph.D. students at the University of Amsterdam; now both were psychologists at Tilburg University. In 2010, Stapel became dean of the university”™s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Zeelenberg head of the social psychology department. Stapel and his wife, Marcelle, had supported Zeelenberg through a difficult divorce a few years earlier. As he approached Zeelenberg”™s door, Stapel wondered if his colleague was having problems with his new girlfriend.
Zeelenberg, a stocky man with a shaved head, led Stapel into his living room. “What”™s up?” Stapel asked, settling onto a couch. Two graduate students had made an accusation, Zeelenberg explained. His eyes began to fill with tears. “They suspect you have been committing research fraud.” Continue reading “Sociopathic Social Research: How One Man Rigged Results for Academic Fame and Fortune”