Free Republic

Scientific studies are used to support controversial social policies like same-sex marriage. But can we rely on them? Even in scientific laboratories Georg Wilhelm Richmann is not a household name. But he ought to be. Richmann was an 18th century Russian scientist who died trying to repeat Benjamin Franklin’s famous experiment of attracting lightning to a kite. A ball of lightning travelled down the cord and struck him dead. The first martyr for the cause of science died trying to replicate another scientist's results. The ability to reproduce the results of an experiment is a key step in the rapid...

A prominent Dutch social psychologist who once claimed to have shown that the very act of thinking about eating meat makes people behave more selfishly has been found to have faked data throughout much of his career. In one of the worst cases of scientific fraud on record in the Netherlands, a review committee made up of some of the country's top scientists has found that University of Tilburg Prof. Diederik Stapel systematically falsified data to achieve the results he wanted. The university has fired the 45-year-old professor and plans to file fraud charges against him, university spokesman Walther Verhoeven...

One of the Netherlands' leading social psychologists made up or manipulated data in dozens of papers over nearly a decade, an investigating committee has concluded. Diederik Stapel was suspended from his position at Tilburg University in the Netherlands in September after three junior researchers reported that they suspected scientific misconduct in his work. Soon after being confronted with the accusations, Stapel reportedly told university officials that some of his papers contained falsified data. The university launched an investigation, as did the University of Groningen and the University of Amsterdam, where Stapel had worked previously. The Tilburg commission today released an...

At the most recent conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the most talked-about speech was one that essentially accused the attendees of bias. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist from the University of Virginia, started his presentation by polling the audience of approximately 1,000 psychologists. When he asked how many considered themselves to be politically liberal, about 80 percent of the hands went up. Centrists and libertarians? Dr. Haidt estimated that fewer than three-dozen hands were raised. When he asked how many were conservatives, precisely three hands went up. As The New York Times reported, Haidt called that...

Dog owners who think their beloved pooch can read their mind may be right. Canterbury University psychology student Michelle Maginnity has just completed a masters research project looking at whether the domestic dog has a theory of mind - that is, whether they can think about the thoughts and feelings of self and others. She said after carrying out a range of experiments which tested the cognitive skills of dogs, she believed they were not only sensitive to human cues, but also had the ability to think about what their human companions may be thinking. "So, in a way, dogs...