Renowned social psychologist, Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, was proved to be a fraud. An investigative committee concluded that Stapel had falsified data in at least "several dozen" of the nearly 150 papers he had published in his extremely prolific career. (Continue reading…)
Just calling something a science does not make it so. Social science? Give me a break. To be a science, you have to create testable hypotheses (sometimes called falsifiable), and then verify that what they predict actually happens with enough regularity to be called a law, and researchers must be willing to revise their hypotheses when conflicting data arises. That is rare, if not impossible in the "social sciences".
One severe flaw in the methodology used by Stapel in his experiment about racism and homophobia was that he did not do any double blind testing, nor did he reverse the race-roles. Why did he not put a single white man at the end of the rows of chairs, and recruit a bunch of black people to fill out the questionnaire? I suspect, doing that might run the risk of exposing crypto-racism and crypto-homophobia in blacks, thereby falsifying the hypothesis that only Caucasians have this problem. It would have made a better experiment though.
Can you imagine the catastrophe, had we approached the development of nuclear energy in the same way we approach the "social sciences" and "climate change"? Egad. Maybe, like the Climategate "scientists", Mr. Stapel thought he was supposed to falsify his experimental results.
Just calling something a science does not make it so. Social science? Give me a break. To be a science, you have to create testable hypotheses (sometimes called falsifiable), and then verify that what they predict actually happens with enough regularity to be called a law, and researchers must be willing to revise their hypotheses when conflicting data arises. That is rare, if not impossible in the "social sciences".
One severe flaw in the methodology used by Stapel in his experiment about racism and homophobia was that he did not do any double blind testing, nor did he reverse the race-roles. Why did he not put a single white man at the end of the rows of chairs, and recruit a bunch of black people to fill out the questionnaire? I suspect, doing that might run the risk of exposing crypto-racism and crypto-homophobia in blacks, thereby falsifying the hypothesis that only Caucasians have this problem. It would have made a better experiment though.
Can you imagine the catastrophe, had we approached the development of nuclear energy in the same way we approach the "social sciences" and "climate change"? Egad. Maybe, like the Climategate "scientists", Mr. Stapel thought he was supposed to falsify his experimental results.
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