User:Darcy.stephenson

Scientific misconduct
It became widely known that Stapel treated his graduate students unfairly, with most of them graduating without ever actually completing an experiment. Stapel controlled the data in his lab, and when students asked to see the raw data, they were often given excuses. to the report, there were occasions when Stapel’s data was given to an assistant to be entered into a computer. This assistant would then give the file to Mr Stapel. The researcher analyzing the data would then receive the file directly from Stapel. Stapel would apparently tell this researcher to, “Be aware that you have gold in your hands.” The report also suggests that Stapel elected to present a list of publications that contained fictitious data.

The interim report pointed to three unidentified “young researchers” as the whistleblowers for the case, and implies that these whistleblowers spent months making observations of Stapel and his work before they concluded that something actually was wrong. (Interim Report) The report also cites two professors who claim they had previously seen examples of Stapel’s data that was “too good to be true”.

In December of 2011, Stapel retracted his first paper, entitled Coping with chaos: How disordered contexts promote stereotyping and discrimination, which was originally published in the journal Science. The journey expressed initial concern regarding the paper's validity on November 1.

In a response to the retraction, coauthor of the Chaos paper Siegwart Lindenberg told the journal Nature in an email, “Stapel’s doing had caught me as much by surprise as it did anybody else. I never had any suspicion. He was a very trusted man, dean of the faculty, brilliant, successful, no indications for me to be distrustful. In this, I was not the only one. I also had no trouble with the results of the experiments.”

At the current time, Tilburg University’s website page on Stapel that once hosted information on his psychological expertise now displays, “D.A. Stapel: No other information available.”

A psychologist at University of California Santa Barbara, Johnathan Schooner, has suggested that Stapel’s ability to participate in such a fraud stemmed from the same traits that can be attributed to some sociopaths. Schooner said, “There's this amazing disregard for one's colleagues and the field and the whole scientific enterprise in engaging in such behavior."

A month after Tilburg University announced that it had found evidence of fraud in Stapel’s work, Science, the journal, posted a retraction notice on Stapel’s co-authored paper entitled Coping with chaos: How disordered contexts promote stereotyping and discrimination.

The report from Science says, “Our Report “Coping with chaos: How disordered contexts promote stereotyping and discrimination” (1) reported the effects of the physical environment on human stereotyping and discriminatory behavior. On 31 October 2011, the University of Tilburg held a press conference to announce findings of their investigation into possible data fraud on the part of author Stapel. These findings of the university’s interim report (2) included fabrication of data in this Science paper. Therefore, we are retracting the paper, with apologies from author Stapel. Coauthor Lindenberg was in no way involved in the generation of the data, and agrees to the retraction of the paper.”

Various Research
Stapel’s authorships and collaborations discuss various topics.

In Categories of Category Accessibility: The Impact of Trait Concept versus Exemplar Priming on Person Judgments, a paper published in January of 1997, Stapel is exploring the differences and similarities between priming traits and priming antonyms. This study, consisting of five different studies, shows that the judgments of a person are not just affected by the priming of relevant traits but by priming the antonyms of these traits. It was found that the effect of priming traits or antonyms was related to whether the inferences were relevant or irrelevant, to what extent they were evaluated, whether they were personal or behavioral, and whether the information found was enough to judge the subject. The paper was published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and lists Diederik A. Stapel, Willem Koomen, and Joop van der Pligt as authors.

In Similarities and Differences between the Impact of Traits and Expectancies: What Matters Is Whether the Target Stimulus Is Ambiguous or Mixed, a paper published in May of 1998, Stapel studies the basis behind when a person has a stereotypical reaction to something that allows you to judge the subject based on their category of personality. This stereotyping either results in assimilation of the stereotypical testing or it results in contrast. The way to test this was by getting the same trait category model, a different trait category model, and matching the subject’s social category to the activated stereotype. This testing led to the findings that accessible stereotype knowledge can lead to fully known stereotypical judgments and counter stereotypical judgments. The paper was published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and lists Diederik A. Stapel, and Nobert Schwarz as authors.

In Interpretation versus Reference Framing: Assimilation and Contrast Effects in the Organizational Domain, a paper published in November of 1998, Stapel is studying whether the type of information activated will get different judgments on the subject. Nonperson models are generally willing to show their influence during impression formation, while person models are more willing during the judgment phase because they are similar to the target they are being compared to. Stapel found that as primed category information is used there are judgments of ambiguous affects. When category information is used there are contrastive judgments. The paper was published by Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and lists Diederik A. Stapel and Willem Koomen as authors.

In Hardly thinking about others: On Cognitive Busyness and Target Similarity in Social Comparison Effects, a paper published in May of 2006, Stapel studies a person’s comparison of themselves and another, and the dependencies on the level of similarity between the two. The paper cites that when a strong similarity was recognized, the subject would provide little contrast between themselves and of the person involved in their comparison. The example given is, “I feel smart because my sister won the Pulitzer prize.” When moderate similarity was recognized the subject provided a moderate contrast between themselves and the person. The example given is, “I feel stupid because my colleague is an excellent chess player.” Finally, when there was little or no similarity recognized, the greatest contrast was experienced. The example given is, “I do not feel less attractive when thinking of Cindy Crawford because she is a professional model and I am a psychologist.” The paper mentions experimentation based on when the subjects were cognitively busy or unable to devote a lot of time to make a comparison. The paper was published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and cites Diederik A. Stapel, and David M. Marx as authors. In The flexible Unconscious: Investigating the Judgmental Impact of Varieties of Unaware Perception, a paper published in January of 2006, Stapel discusses how the accessibility of information affects the judgment of a subject. When information is readily accessible the subject usually makes a contrastive comparison between the new and familiar stimuli. When the information is moderately accessible they are usually assimilative, not placing either the new or familiar stimuli above the other, but giving them equal status. When there is little information provided, there is little comparison made between new and familiar stimuli, and such comparison is often unimportant. The practical uses discussed in this study include examples of advertisements of a product. In general, the more information and exposure someone has to a product, the more likely they are to believe that the product is better than other brands. The paper was published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and cites Diederik A. Stapel and Willem Koomen as authors.