A celebrated social psychologist faked the data in dozens of studies for years

Diederik Stapel was a Dutch social psychologist, a professor at Tilburg University, and a rising star of his field. His studies were elegant and produced striking, media-friendly results about human behavior — the kind that made headlines and won awards, including a career award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 2009.

In 2011, the edifice collapsed. Junior researchers who had worked with Stapel noticed that the data he handed them was too perfect and raised concerns. An investigation found that Stapel had been fabricating and manipulating data for years — he had simply made up the results of studies that, in many cases, were never actually conducted. By 2015, fifty-eight of his publications had been retracted. The New York Times called him 'the biggest con man in academic science.'

The scandal was devastating for the researchers who had co-authored Stapel's papers in good faith, and for a field already grappling with concerns about reproducibility. Stapel surrendered his PhD title and his career ended; Dutch prosecutors declined to pursue criminal charges, in part because he cooperated and gave up his doctorate. The case became a landmark in the 'replication crisis' in social science, intensifying demands for open data, pre-registration, and independent verification of results.