Addicted to success

By Igrene Ogrizek. In the summer of 2011, a Dutch social psychologist was in the process of losing his job. His name was Diederik Stapel and he had committed an unimaginable fraud: over 10 years he had falsified data for more than 55 experiments, some of which formed the basis of doctoral theses he had supervised. Stapel was a researcher who studied ‘priming’, the influence exerted on individuals by suggestive information. He was most interested in its effects on self-assessment: his doctoral thesis focused on whether we assimilate or contrast when primed with information. More...