Social psychology fraud: Just tell professors what they want to hear

Here's a long NYT Magazine article on Diederik Stapel, a prominent Dutch social psychologist:

The Mind of a Con Man

By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE 

Published: April 26, 2013  

One summer night in 2011, a tall, 40-something professor named Diederik Stapel stepped out of his elegant brick house in the Dutch city of Tilburg to visit a friend around the corner. It was close to midnight, but his colleague Marcel Zeelenberg had called and texted Stapel that evening to say that he wanted to see him about an urgent matter. 

... “What’s up?” Stapel asked, settling onto a couch. Two graduate students had made an accusation, Zeelenberg explained. His eyes began to fill with tears. “They suspect you have been committing research fraud.” 

Stapel was an academic star in the Netherlands and abroad, the author of several well-regarded studies on human attitudes and behavior. That spring, he published a widely publicized study in Science about an experiment done at the Utrecht train station showing that a trash-filled environment tended to bring out racist tendencies in individuals. ... 

On his return trip to Tilburg, Stapel stopped at the train station in Utrecht. This was the site of his study linking racism to environmental untidiness, supposedly conducted during a strike by sanitation workers. In the experiment described in the Science paper, white volunteers were invited to fill out a questionnaire in a seat among a row of six chairs; the row was empty except for the first chair, which was taken by a black occupant or a white one. Stapel and his co-author claimed that white volunteers tended to sit farther away from the black person when the surrounding area was strewn with garbage. Now, looking around during rush hour, as people streamed on and off the platforms, Stapel could not find a location that matched the conditions described in his experiment. 

“No, Diederik, this is ridiculous,” he told himself at last. “You really need to give it up.” ...

In reality, Stapel had simply made up all the data for this, his most popular study, and at least 54 others. He never carried out the studies; he just typed plausible sounding numbers into his computer.

Not surprisingly, the quasi-bogus field of "priming" attracted Stapel, where, apparently, he first started to get creative.

While there, Stapel began testing the idea that priming could affect people without their being aware of it. ... The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his hypothesis was valid. “I said — you know what, I am going to create the data set,” he told me. 

Sitting at his kitchen table in Groningen, he began typing numbers into his laptop that would give him the outcome he wanted. He knew that the effect he was looking for had to be small in order to be believable; even the most successful psychology experiments rarely yield significant results. The math had to be done in reverse order: the individual attractiveness scores that subjects gave themselves on a 0-7 scale needed to be such that Stapel would get a small but significant difference in the average scores for each of the two conditions he was comparing. He made up individual scores like 4, 5, 3, 3 for subjects who were shown the attractive face. “I tried to make it random, which of course was very hard to do,” Stapel told me. 

Doing the analysis, Stapel at first ended up getting a bigger difference between the two conditions than was ideal. He went back and tweaked the numbers again. It took a few hours of trial and error, spread out over a few days, to get the data just right. 

He said he felt both terrible and relieved. The results were published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2004. “I realized — hey, we can do this,” he told me. 

Stapel’s career took off. He published more than two dozen studies while at Groningen, many of them written with his doctoral students. They don’t appear to have questioned why their supervisor was running many of the experiments for them. Nor did his colleagues inquire about this unusual practice. 

In 2006, Stapel moved to Tilburg, joining Zeelenberg. Students flocked to his lab, and he quickly rose in influence. In September 2010, he became dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He could have retreated from active research to focus on administration, but, he told me, he couldn’t resist the allure of fabricating new results. He had already made up the data for the Utrecht train-station study and was working on the paper that would appear in Science the following year. Colleagues sought him out to take part in new collaborations. ...

The key to why Stapel got away with his fabrications for so long lies in his keen understanding of the sociology of his field. “I didn’t do strange stuff, I never said let’s do an experiment to show that the earth is flat,” he said. “I always checked — this may be by a cunning manipulative mind — that the experiment was reasonable, that it followed from the research that had come before, that it was just this extra step that everybody was waiting for.” 

Obviously, with his famous study of white racism at the Utrecht train station, it helps to deliver lessons that the world wants to hear. The problem for honest social scientists is that large parts of reality are more or less off limits. Nobody wants to hear honest, wide-ranging truths about race these days.

For example, to this day, we constantly read denunciations of the IQ researcher Sir Cyril Burt (1883-1971), despite the murkiness of the story. Why? Because his results disputed the idea that heredity plays no role of intelligence. Similarly, the saintly Arthur Jensen was largely shoved down the memory hole so that we had to get a drive going just to get the great man obituarized when he died last year.

Yet, we see the 1960's work of Rick Heber of the Milwaukee Project enthusiastically cited in the NYT a generation after Heber went to prison for fraud.

In Nicholas D. Kristof's 4/15/2009 column in the NYT, he wrote:

Professor Nisbett strongly advocates intensive early childhood education because of its proven ability to raise I.Q. and improve long-term outcomes. The Milwaukee Project, for example, took African-American children considered at risk for mental retardation and assigned them randomly either to a control group that received no help or to a group that enjoyed intensive day care and education from 6 months of age until they left to enter first grade.
By age 5, the children in the program averaged an I.Q. of 110, compared with 83 for children in the control group. Even years later in adolescence, those children were still 10 points ahead in I.Q.

From the Concise Encyclopedia of Special Education (latest edition 2002).

The term Milwaukee Project is the popular title of a widely publicized program begun in the mid-1960s as one of many Great Society efforts to improve the intellectual development of low-achieving groups. It was headed by Rick Heber of the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison, who was also director of the generously funded Waisman Institute in Madison. The Milwaukee Project was a small study with some 20 experimental subjects and 20 control subjects. It was not reported on by the investigators in any refereed scientific journals, yet its cost was some $14 million, mostly in federal funds, and its fame was international, since it claimed to have moved the IQs of its subject children from the dull-normal range of intelligence to the superior range of intelligence. ...

Enthusiasm, controversy, and scandal subsequently surrounded the history of the project. Its claimed success was hailed by famous psychologists and by the popular media. Later in the project, Heber, the principal investigator, was discharged from UW, Madison and convicted and imprisoned for large-scale abuse of federal funding for private gain. Two of his colleagues were also convicted of violations of federal laws in connection with misuse of project funds. …. However, the project received uncritical acceptance in many college textbooks in psychology and education.

Why? Because there is a market for lies.

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Obama hands out billions in fraudulent bias claims

I'm shocked, shocked to learn that former civil rights lawyer turned Chicago politician Barack Obama has been handing out billions of taxpayer dollars to largely fraudulent civil rights plaintiffs:

From the NYT:

Federal Spigot Flows as Farmers Claim Bias 

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

In the winter of 2010, after a decade of defending the government against bias claims by Hispanic and female farmers, Justice Department lawyers seemed to have victory within their grasp. 

Ever since the Clinton administration agreed in 1999 to make $50,000 payments to thousands of black farmers, the Hispanics and women had been clamoring in courtrooms and in Congress for the same deal. They argued, as the African-Americans had, that biased federal loan officers had systematically thwarted their attempts to borrow money to farm. 

But a succession of courts — and finally the Supreme Court — had rebuffed their pleas. Instead of an army of potential claimants, the government faced just 91 plaintiffs. Those cases, the government lawyers figured, could be dispatched at limited cost. 

They were wrong. 

On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court. 

The deal, several current and former government officials said, was fashioned in White House meetings despite the vehement objections — until now undisclosed — of career lawyers and agency officials who had argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination. What is more, some protested, the template for the deal — the $50,000 payouts to black farmers — had proved a magnet for fraud. 

“I think a lot of people were disappointed,” said J. Michael Kelly, who retired last year as the Agriculture Department’s associate general counsel. “You can’t spend a lot of years trying to defend those cases honestly, then have the tables turned on you and not question the wisdom of settling them in a broad sweep.” 

The compensation effort sprang from a desire to redress what the government and a federal judge agreed was a painful legacy of bias against African-Americans by the Agriculture Department. But an examination by The New York Times shows that it became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have filed claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion. 

From the start, the claims process prompted allegations of widespread fraud and criticism that its very design encouraged people to lie: because relatively few records remained to verify accusations, claimants were not required to present documentary evidence that they had been unfairly treated or had even tried to farm. Agriculture Department reviewers found reams of suspicious claims, from nursery-school-age children and pockets of urban dwellers, sometimes in the same handwriting with nearly identical accounts of discrimination. 

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Future son-in-law of Speaker of the House

The Cat in the Hat

Not every political family, it turns out, is succeeding at getting its progeny to marry into billionaire families.

The Most Interesting Newspaper in the World, the Daily Mail, runs this picture of the Florida construction worker and dreadlocked Jamaican immigrant Dominic Lakhan, age 38, who next month will marry the 35-year-old daughter of Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH).

Iron Eyes Boehner

The burnt orange Speaker is of Oompa-Loompan ancestry himself. (Other prominent Loompans include Angelo Mozilo, Donald Trump, and Mitt Romney.)

Mr. Lakhan (a name that sounds vaguely Subcontinental) was arrested in 2006 for driving while drinking a Natural Light and smoking weed.

I was going to do an extensive Internet search to make sure Mr. Lakhan isn't actually the eccentric heir to a Jamaican bauxite fortune, but then I noticed that, like your correspondent, he drinks Natty Light H2O-flavored beerwater.

Here's my 2012 discussion with Charles Murray about the question on his Class Markers Quiz about whether you drink mass market beers like Bud, and what my drinking a sub-mass market beer furtively aimed at the frat boy and wino demographics says about our class status. I think Charles and I left it at classless.

Anyway, that reminded me that I need to make more money, which is why I've started my first panhandling drive of 2013.

I am grateful for your readership and tangible support. I'm running a Spring panhandling drive soliciting your contributions.

First: you can make a non-tax deductible contribution to me by credit card via WePay by clicking here.

Second: you can make a tax deductible contribution to me via VDARE by clicking here.

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.

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To fight sexism, Coachella should have Celine Dion headline

From Slate:

The Real Reason Summer Festivals Have So Few Women 

By Forrest Wickman | Posted Wednesday, April 24, 2013, at 3:19 PM 

Last week, an article on BuzzFeed asked, “Where Are All the Women at Coachella?”

Coachella is a big outdoor rock music festival every April in the Greater Palm Springs area that appeals to white kids with 3 digit IQs who like electric guitars and new wavier synthesizers. Heck, I even know who some of the bands playing there this year were (e.g., New Order, Social Distortion, Violent Femmes, Dropkick Murphys, Jello Biafra, Sparks, The Selecter, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Vampire Weekend, and OMD).

The conclusion the authors reached was unsurprising. As they had expected, a breakdown of the festival’s lineups by gender showed that, year after year, the bills have been dominated by men. In fact, it wasn’t even close. In this year’s lineup, female-fronted acts represented only a little more than 10 percent of the more than 500 artists who played. The festival hasn’t fared much better in the past: On average, just over 15 percent of the festival’s acts have been fronted by women.  

... Perhaps they didn’t want to lob accusations of sexism, which can be uncomfortable, or to face the commenters, who have been mostly vicious and defensive. “There is legitimate gender inequality in the music industry,” says one unusually civil commenter, “but the problem does not lie in Coachella.” “Stupid article,” says another. “This suggests that the actual pool of marketable music acts is 50% male and female-fronted, but festivals are the ones f------ it up. Please.” 

I've noticed that professional journalists who are paid to wield Occam's Butterknife are getting angrier and angrier over how they get repeatedly cut to pieces by anonymous commenters wielding Occam's Razor.

The idea behind both comments is that festivals simply reflect disparities within the music industry, which is supposedly dominated by male acts generally. The problem with this line of argument is that it relies on assumptions that simply aren’t true, and have long been outdated. In fact, the festivals are the ones f***** it up, while women practically dominate the music Americans listen to and enjoy. 

If that sounds unlikely or surprising, just look at the Billboard charts, about as cold and dispassionate a measure as we have. ... In 2009, women held not just the top spot, but the top five spots, with Taylor Swift leading the way. In 2010, Swift came in at No. 2, while another multitalented singer and songwriter, Lady Gaga, came in at No. 1. In 2011, both these artists were crushed by Artist of the Year Adele, who had both the biggest album and the biggest single of the year, with three other women filling out the top four spots. I 

... Still, this doesn’t excuse Coachella. Each of these measures, chosen not by planners but by unplanned democratic consensus, celebrates many more female voices than that festival does.

So am I saying that the organizers in Indio, or the fans they’re trying to please, hate women? No. The problem is larger than that and not nearly so simple. Indeed, most of the big music festivals have the same problem. For this year’s Lollapalooza, the top 13 acts are all fronted by men. At Bonnaroo, Björk is the only woman among the top 10 headliners. Festivals like Outside Lands, Sasquatch, and the electronic music festival Ultra are similarly male-dominated, though Pitchfork—four of whose top six acts this year are great solo female artists—shows that each of these festivals could do better. 

Instead, the real problem at most of these festivals lies in the alternative subcultures they celebrate. Formed out of the male-dominated music scenes of jam music (in the case of Bonnaroo), late-’90s indie rock (Coachella), and early ’90s alternative and grunge (Lollapalooza), these festivals tend to celebrate diversity while dismissing the most popular pop acts—the ones who tend to dominate the charts and who tend so often to be female—as frivolous or corporate. 

As the festivals expand beyond their narrow roots, maybe fans and organizers should start to take the commercially and critically successful female acts they currently deride more seriously. 

The basic issue is that rock music traditionally celebrates artistic diversity and innovation, which comes overwhelmingly from men. Women are more conformist and less driven, so they are less likely to push the envelope.

This is a general conundrum in culture in the 21st Century: We are supposed to celebrate diversity and we are supposed to admire the épater le bourgeois spirit that motivated Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and so forth. No problem, right? Except that the épater urge and achievement was -- and remains -- strongest in white males.

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Demolition Dad, Bomb Mom, and Babushka of Boom hold news conference

Demolition Dad, Bomb Mom, and Babushka of Boom

There has been much speculation in the press about what idiosyncratic, one-in-a-million motives Tamerlan or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev might have had. For example, scientists at Boston University want to scan the late Tamerlan's brain to see if boxing had caused any of the brain damage associated with NFL players who commit suicides (see in Slate: Did Concussions Make Him Do It?)

But such analyses seems better suited for lone wolf killers. When you have two brothers, an ethnic analysis seems more plausible, especially when the ethnic backgrounds are famously volatile. My best guess is that the Tsarnaevs were brave young men aspiring to live up to the legends of their peoples, region, and religion by engaging in traditional modes of defiance in the manner of the lethal ethnic raiders / rebels celebrated by Tolstoy and other great Russian writers.

And, indeed, it turns out that the older generation of the Tsarnaev family just did a new conference, which provided an object lesson in North Caucasus Muslim worldviews, values, and interpersonal style that the younger generation took upon themselves to embody in an even more vigorous and vibrant way:

Parents Say Boston Bombing Suspects Are Innocent 

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN 

MAKHACHKALA, Russia — The parents of the two brothers accused in the bomb attack that killed three people and wounded more than 260 near the finish line of the Boston Marathon insisted on Thursday that their sons were innocent and had no connection to radical Islam. 

In an outpouring of anguish and anger at a news conference here in the capital of Dagestan, the brothers’ father, Anzor Tsarnaev, and mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, also made accusations of a conspiracy in which the American authorities murdered their older son, Tamerlan, after seizing him. 

... Despite this evidence, and after two days of questioning by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation here, Ms. Tsarnaeva said she would not accept that her sons were guilty. 

“No I don’t — and I won’t,” she snapped at the news conference. “Never!” 

During an emotional, nearly hourlong question-and-answer session, the parents addressed many of the questions that investigators and the American public have been asking in the anxious, unsettled days after the bombing, insisting their sons were not religious radicals or connected to any terrorist organization. 

Their answers were often a mixture of denial and conspiracy theory. 

In one dramatic moment, Ms. Tsarnaeva said that F.B.I. agents who came to the family’s home in Massachusetts to question Tamerlan about his religious views had asked her if she worried that he might commit an act of terrorism. 

“Actually, they told me, don’t you think that Tamerlan is being a little bit, you know, like, extreme about religion?” she said. “Do you think that he would think about organizing some kind of, you know ——” She broke off and stumbled over her words. “Probably that was their meaning: terroristic, terrorism or whatever, aggression.” 

“Do you see any aggression in Tamerlan?” she said, quoting the agents. “No, I did not. I did not. I really did not see any reason to worry.” 

Ms. Tsarnaeva said that she was considering giving up her American citizenship. 

We must look deep into our hearts to search for how we've failed this woman who came here due to her love of the Declaration of Independence and Emma Lazarus's poem, only to learn the horrible truth that Americans don't always live up to their Propositions.

The parents spoke alternately in Russian and English, sometimes starting a sentence in one language and finishing in the other. Mr. Tsarnaev wore dark sunglasses, while Ms. Tsarnaeva wore a head scarf, which is customary among many women in this predominantly Muslim region. 

They said that they regretted having lived in the United States, but that they wanted to travel back soon see Dzhokhar, though they expressed fear that they would not be allowed to see him until he was put in prison. 

“Yes, I would prefer not to live in America now. Like, why did I even go there — why?” Ms. Tsarnaeva said, nearly breaking into tears. “I thought America was going to, like, protect us, our kids, it was going to be safe for any reason. But it happened the opposite. My kids — America took my kids away from me — only America. So why wouldn’t I regret? Why?” 

“I don’t know,” she said, regaining her composure. “I am sure that my kids were not involved in anything.” 

... Anzor Tsarnaev responded sharply to a reporter who asked why Tamerlan had felt that he did not fit in among Americans, once saying he did not have any friends. 

“That’s not true,” Mr. Tsarnaev said. “He have a lot of friends. I know these friends.”

But he had three fewer American friends after that unfortunate incident in Waltham on the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

Ms. Tsarnaeva jumped in to say that Tamerlan had meant he did not have a best friend. “It does not mean that he did not fit in America,” she said. 

The parents said the F.B.I. agents who questioned them had been most interested in Tamerlan’s six-month visit to Dagestan last year, which they said had been undertaken so that he could obtain a Russian passport. Although he was born in Russia, Tamerlan had traveled on a passport from Kyrgyzstan, where the family lived, that was about to expire. They said he needed a Russian passport because he did not have American citizenship. 

Ms. Tsarnaeva reacted furiously to a questioner who said Dzhokhar had told officials the brothers were motivated by extremist Islam. “I’ll answer,” she said. “They told me yesterday that he was not questioned yet,” she said of her son’s lawyers. “Where does this information come from? Where does this information come from?” 

“Where does this information come from?” she shouted again. 

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Lauren Bush Lauren: Your GOP Presidential candidate in 2032-2036

Lauren Bush Lauren
and husband
David Lauren

Owing to demographic progress in the United States, America is becoming too diverse for white men to monopolize all the good jobs. Thus, Jeb Bush, with his Mexican Connections, will be the last white man to earn the GOP Presidential nomination.  On the other hand, history suggests that multicultural empires are too diverse to hold together without one hereditary dynasty as the locus of loyalties.

Therefore, after Jeb in 2016 - 2020, the first Hispanic man to be the GOP standardbearer will be his son George P. Bush in 2024-2028. 

But then who in 2032-2036?

By then, it will be time for a woman and for somebody whose last name isn't Bush (while still being a Bush). But, in this era of declining attention spans, the GOP nominee's last name will still need to be a trusted brand name, one that appears, say, on billions of pieces of clothing. In fact, why not double up and use the heavily advertised brand name as both a last and first name, while still inserting the mandatory Bush brand name as a middle maiden name? Thus, the inevitable GOP heiress apparent for the 2030s: 

Lauren Bush Lauren Is Making a Name for Herself 

By BEE-SHYUAN CHANG 

For Lauren Bush Lauren, the strikingly attractive niece of one president and the granddaughter of another, as well as the daughter-in-law of a legendary figure in the world of American fashion, it’s not easy to go unnoticed. 

At Ralph Lauren’s fall 2013 show during the most recent New York Fashion Week, the paparazzi snapped her photo as she sat in the front row with her husband, David Lauren; her mother-in-law, Ricky Lauren; and media heavyweights such as Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair and David Remnick of The New Yorker. 

At a recent lunch at the Standard hotel, as she dined on a chopped salad (with a side of pickles), a few patrons glanced over quizzically, as if they knew they should know her from somewhere — a model? an actress? A Real Housewife? — while the waiters hovered solicitously. 

And in early April, at the Hale House gala honoring her mother, Sharon Bush, for her philanthropic work, a hush seemed to come over the crowd as Ms. Bush Lauren, her husband and her younger siblings, Pierce and Ashley, made their way around the room. They formed such a regal vignette that the evening’s host, the actress Patricia Clarkson, later joked onstage: “It’s a shame they’re so attractive.” 

Ms. Bush Lauren seems to take such attention in stride. But it wasn’t always thus. 

Raised mostly in Texas and educated at Princeton, she moved to New York in 2006, having already worked here as a model, one whose last name guaranteed a certain level of ready fame.

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Jeb Bush and the Decline of Disinterestedness

From the Washington Post:

Hispanic consciousness lends weight to Jeb Bush as GOP eyes 2016 presidential race 

By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Peter Wallsten, Published: April 24 

MIAMI — She was almost like a member of the family. An employee, but almost one of them. 

For three years, Maria Magdalena Romero had tended to the suburban Miami home of Jeb and Columba Bush, had helped to raise their three children, had twined into the fabric of their lives. 

Then, with lurching swiftness, she was yanked away. On a mild winter morning in 1991, two immigration agents appeared at the door of the family home looking for the woman Bush’s younger son and namesake, then just 10 years old, remembers as “a super nice lady.” They carried deportation orders. 

It didn’t matter that Bush’s father was president of the United States at the time or that a Secret Service agent had answered the door. Romero, who was in the country illegally but had a work permit, wasn’t getting a reprieve. 

Wow. So, way back under the Bush the Elder Administration, federal officials felt confident enough to inconvenience the President's own son for illegally employing a cheap servant?

John Adams, who called for "a government of laws, not of men," would have been proud.

Of course, these days, disinterestedness is just one of those tiresome WASP hang-ups.

... That long-ago deportation is one among many inflection points for the elder Bush in what has been a lifetime of intimate proximity to America’s Hispanic community, to its searing pain and its buoyant joy, to its mores and its politics. 

While Republicans cast about for leaders who can connect with Spanish-speaking voters, this tall Texas native with the Mexican American wife has remarkably come to represent a kind of Hispanic consciousness for the party. 

Living in Miami, mixing effortlessly with that city’s Cuban American power base and speaking near-flawless Spanish, Bush has managed to embody an adopted culture that has enthusiastically adopted him. As former commerce secretary Carlos Gutierrez put it at last week’s Hispanic Leadership Network conference in Miami, the former Florida governor is “just as Hispanic as everyone in this room, and maybe a little more.”

Carlos Gutierrez is the most extreme example of the Hidalgo-American types who have been lecturing us evil white folk on our evil white racism lately.

It is a distinction that lends considerable weight to Bush — who was successful in attracting votes from both Republican and Democratic Latinos in his gubernatorial races — in the handicapping for 2016’s GOP presidential candidates. Speculation about another Bush presidency is permeating the festivities this week as Bush, 60, joins his presidential brother and father and the rest of the family in Dallas for the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. In a C-Span interview airing Wednesday night, George W. Bush stokes the speculation about his brother’s presidential prospects, saying, “My first advice is: Run.”

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