"Anatomy of a Politically Painful Fraud"
http://worldofweirdthings.com/2015/06/02/anatomy-of-a-politically-painful-fraud/
Last year on Dec 12 a study was published in Science, one of the world's leading peer-reviewed science journals. This study claimed that talking with a friendly person who then identified themselves as a homosexual was a significant factor in changing people's minds about same-sex marriage. That study was fraudulent. Jesse Singal was (I think) the first to expose the fraud in the New York Magazine, but "Anatomy of a Politically Painful Fraud," quoted below, tells us why it has taken so long for anyone to prove that it was fraud. In my mind, this is more painful than the actual fraud, for anyone can cheat a good system once, but amount of cheating that can happen in a broken system is untold. And our system is most definitely broken.
"New York Magazine has the details on how exactly the study came undone, and some parts of the story, held up in the comments as supposed proof of universities’ supposed grand Marxist-homosexual conspiracy to turn education into anti-capitalist and pro-gay propaganda as one is bound to expect, actually shine a light into why it took so long for the fraud to be discovered. It’s easy to just declare that researchers didn’t look at the study too closely because they wanted it to be true, that finding some empirical proof that sitting a homophobe down with a well dressed and successful gay person for half an hour would solve social ills was so tempting to accept, no one wanted to question it. Easy, but wrong. If you’ve ever spent time with academics or tried to become one in grad school, you’d know that the reason why it took exceptional tenacity to track down and expose LaCour’s fraud is because scientists, by in large, are no longer paid to check, review, and replicate others’ work. Their incentive is to generate new papers and secure grants to pay for their labs and administrators’ often outrageous salaries, and that’s it.
Scientists have always lived by the paradigm of “publish or perish,” the idea that if you publish a constant stream of quality work in good journals, your career continues, and once you stop, you are no longer relevant or necessary, and should quit. But nowadays, the pressure to publish to get tenure and secure grants is so strong that the number of papers on which you have a byline more or less seals your future. Forget doing five or six good papers a year, no one really cares how good they were unless they’re Nobel Prize worthy, you’re now expected to have a hundred publications or more when you’re being considered for tenure. Quality has lost to quantity. It’s a one of the big reasons why I decided not to pursue a PhD despite having the grades and more than enough desire to do research. When my only incentives would be to churn out volume and try to hit up DARPA or the USAF for grant money against another 800 voices as loud and every bit as desperate to keep their jobs as mine, how could I possibly focus on quality and do bigger and more ambitious projects based on my own work and current literature?"
"...When scientists know that a big project and a lot of follow up work confirming their results is the only way to get tenure, they will be very hesitant to pull off brazen frauds since thorough peer review is now one of the scientists’ most important tasks, rather than an afterthought in the hunt for more bylines…"
