I was warned off social psychology years ago by a friend (who was a research psychologist) because of the field's propensity for 'sexy' results which get a lot of media play. As a lay person he doubted I could tell the fake from the reliable, the one off from the replicable. Later someone else told me about how dispiriting it was engaging in data dredging to find something publishable in a lab where they were working, even though many of the principals involved obviously assumed that the results weren't robust. Keep that in mind when you read about the mind-boggling scientific fraud perpetrated by Diederik Stapel. It looks like he might be the Bernie Madoff of psychology. The Lehman Brothers to the Long Term Capital Management of Marc Hauser. Here's a taste:
Stapel's work encompassed a broad range of attention-catching topics, including the influence of power on moral thinking and ...
