Andrew Gelman: Fake study on changing attitudes: Sometimes a claim that is too good to be true, isn’t
"....Not to spoil the suspense or anything, but what really happened was that the data were faked by first author LaCour. Co-author Green (my colleague at Columbia) had taken his collaborator’s data on faith; once he found out, he firmly retracted the article. Details at Retraction Watch.
....It’s an interesting aspect of science, that we can work hard and come up with stories for anything. Indeed, I published a political science paper several years ago that I later retracted, not because the data were faked, but because we had miscoded one of the variables, and it completely destroyed our analyses and conclusions. So these things happen........
Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. His books include Bayesian Data Analysis; Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks; and Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do.