clair015

Over the weekend, an (anonymized) interview was published in a Dutch national newspaper with the three “whistle blowers” who exposed the enormous fraud of Professor Diederik Stapel . Stapel had gained stardom status in the field of social psychology but, simply speaking, had been making up all his data all the time. There are two things that struck me: First, in a previous post I wrote about the fraud, based on a flurry of newspaper articles and the interim report that a committee examining the fraud has put together, I wrote that it eventually was his clumsiness faking the data that got him caught. Although that general picture certainly remained – he wasn’t very good at faking data; I think I could have easily done a better job (although I have never even tried anything like that, honest!) – but it wasn’t as clumsy as the newspapers sometimes made it out to be. Specifically, I wrote “eventually, he did not even bother anymore to really make up newly faked data. He used the same (fake...

Researchers in Management and Strategy worry a lot about bias – statistical bias. In case you’re not such an academic researcher, let me briefly explain. Suppose you want to find out how many members of a rugby club have their nipples pierced (to pick a random example). The problem is, the club has 200 members and you don’t want to ask them all to take their shirts off. Therefore, you select a sample of 20 of them guys and ask them to bare their chests. After some friendly bantering they agree, and then it appears that no fewer than 15 of them have their nipples pierced, so you conclude that the majority of players in the club likely have undergone the slightly painful (or so I am told) aesthetic enhancement. The problem is, there is a chance that you’re wrong. There is a chance that due to sheer coincidence you happened to select 15 pierced pairs of nipples where among the full set of 200 members they are very much the minority. For example, if in reality out of the 200 rugby blokes o...