NEWS | I N D E P T H
overruns for the international fusion experiment ITER under construction in Cadarache, France. “The facility construction and day-to-day project management should stay in the hands of DOE,” says a staffer with the Democratic majority in the Senate. “We don’t want to repeat project management problems that have plagued ITER, and we don’t want to overly complicate a billiondollar-class science construction project.” However, James Siegrist, DOE’s associate director for high-energy physics, says CERN’s successful LHC collaboration can serve as a model for a U.S.-based project: “I’m pretty confident we can figure this out.” The P5 report also recommends increasing funding for smaller underground experiments to detect particles of dark matter. But it calls for an end to current R&D efforts to develop a collider that smashes muons, heavier unstable cousins of electrons, and several other projects. Money could strain P5’s global plan. P5
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY
Jens Förster can’t provide original data on studies.
Psychologist’s defense challenged E-mails counter claimed location, timing of studies
The international approach may be key to securing Fermilab’s future.
By Frank van Kolfschooten
PHOTOS: (LEFT) REIDAR HAHN/FERMILAB; (RIGHT) HUMBOLDT-STIFTUNG/SVEN MÜLLER
W one-third the size of the previous proposal, located at the surface. P5 now says researchers should scrap that attenuated plan and start over with a bigger international effort. That most likely means the project would have to answer to an international council like the one that governs CERN, says Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “The U.S. government has to accept that it has to give up something in the way they normally do things,” he says. Rolf Heuer, director-general of CERN, says such an arrangement would be very important for European physicists. “An international project is not one where I say what I’m going to do and you can do it, too,” Heuer says. “It’s one where the participants are on the same eye level.” That approach may be hard to sell to Congress, especially as it deals with huge cost
considered three budget scenarios: One in which DOE’s particle physics budget, now $797 million, increases by a meager 5% over 10 years, one in which it increases by 17% over 10 years, and one in which it is unlimited. In the first two cases, the United States could contribute only R&D money and some hardware to the ILC. If the United States doesn’t play ball on the ILC, then Japan could opt for its own proposed neutrino experiment. “That’s a challenge for the strategy,” says HEPAP’s Lankford, although he says the U.S. project might be able to go ahead without Japan. DOE officials hope the plan will help unify the factious U.S. particle community. “It’s the right fit for this global picture,” Siegrist says. “So hopefully people will recognize that.” ■
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
ith a once distinguished career, a €5 million grant, and a new professorship all hanging in the balance, social psychologist Jens Förster has vigorously fought back against recent charges that some of his results are so statistically improbable that they could only have resulted from data manipulation. But a key element of his defense has also exposed Förster, who recently resigned from the University of Amsterdam (UvA), to a new line of attack. E-mails reviewed by Science call into question his assertion that some of the studies at the heart of the controversy were not conducted recently at UvA but were done much earlier in Germany over a decadelong period ending in 2008. In explaining certain puzzling aspects of the study subjects, and his inability to provide the original data files on them, Förster had said the studies took place long ago at another institution. The e-mails between Förster and a UvA colleague discuss how to conduct various aspects of some of those studies—yet the e-mails were sent in May 2009, undercutting Förster’s timeline. This perplexing saga began in 2012 when another psychologist expressed concern to UvA about unusually large effects that seemed improbably consistent, reported in 40 studies described in three papers. After participants had been “primed” by subtle stimuli, such as hearing poems, their scores 30 MAY 2014 • VOL 344 ISSUE 6187
Published by AAAS
957
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on June 2, 2015
40,000 tonnes of frigid liquid argon and set 1480 meters down in an abandoned gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. It would study how the “flavors” of neutrinos morph into one another as they zing along at near light speed. The experiment’s main goal would be to spot an asymmetry between the behavior of neutrinos and antineutrinos that could help explain how the universe generated so much more matter than antimatter. Fermilab researchers already had a plan for such a project, called the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE). In 2012, Fermilab physicists presented a design for a neutrino detector filled with 34,000 tonnes of liquid argon in the mine. The underground detector also could have looked for signs that protons in the liquid argon decay—a key prediction of some theories— and spotted neutrinos from supernovas. But DOE officials balked at LBNE’s $1.5 billion price tag. So, Fermilab physicists proposed a $789 million version with a detector less than
NEWS | I N D E P T H
This 2009 e-mail between Jens Förster and his research assistant seemingly discusses plans for a study Förster says was already completed by 2008.
on a cognitive ability test rose significantly. The complaint sparked a UvA investigation that delved into the statistics of Förster’s publications and found some “virtually impossible” results in papers published in 2009, 2011, and 2012, but did not conclude misconduct. A second inquiry, by the Netherlands’ National Board for Research Integrity, did conclude that data had been manipulated in the 2012 paper published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, however. UvA has recommended that that paper be retracted, but Förster has not acceded. In addition to questioning Förster’s results, the person who filed the complaint had expressed skepticism about the recorded information on the study subjects, noting, for example, that the sex ratio of the participants was very different from that among students at UvA. The psychologist also found it suspicious that the 2012 paper and two others recorded not a single study dropout, out of more than 2200 participants across 40 experiments, and not a single participant who had guessed the purpose of the study—even though many of them were presumably psychology students at UvA. In a 11 May posting on his website, Förster reiterated a previous denial of data manipulation and stressed that his challenger had made a key mistaken assumption—the studies documented in the 2011 and 2012 papers, Förster says, were conducted from 1999 to 2008 in Germany, mostly at Jacobs University Bremen, with the help of more than 150 co-workers. Förster further hinted that one of those people might have manufactured the exceptional results. “I can also not exclude the possibility that the data has been manipulated by someone involved in the data collection or data processing. … During the time of investigation I tried to figure out who could have done something inappropriate. However, I had to accept that there is no chance to trace this back; after all, the stud958
“I can only conclude we were still working on the exact design of the experiments in May 2009.” Pieter Verhoeven
ies were run more than 7 years ago and I am not even entirely sure when, and I worked with too many people,” he wrote. In an earlier posting on 29 April, Förster wrote that he had thrown away the original questionnaires for the challenged studies when he moved to a much smaller office in Amsterdam. (In that posting, he did not note where the studies were done.) In his 11 May statement, Förster noted that he provided both investigations with processed data files, one of which contained questionnaire answers in German, which he says proves the experiments were performed in Germany and not in Amsterdam as had been assumed. Those files are time-stamped February 2013, however, according to Förster’s challenger and a second source, who has access to the data files but does not want to be named. Förster’s accuser says the integrity committee of UvA should have asked for data files with a time stamp before September 2012, when the complaint was filed. He also says the UvA erred by not confiscating Förster’s computer, as often happens in such investigations. (The whistleblower’s identity is known to Förster, the university, and the national investigating body, but he agreed to talk to Science only if not named.) The real challenge to Förster’s timeline may lie in e-mails between him and Pieter Verhoeven, his research assistant at UvA from September 2008 to June 2009, who made the correspondence available to Förster’s accuser. In it, the two discuss how to conduct
what are evidently the same experiments Förster’s blog declares were completed much earlier in Bremen. For instance, among the stimuli used are three unintelligible audio recordings, which the 2011 paper says were described to the subjects as “Moldavian” poems. In an 18 May 2009 e-mail, Verhoeven comes up with the idea to describe the poem that way, rather than as Malaysian, because the reader of the poem has a German accent. In another e-mail, sent to Verhoeven on 13 May 2009, Förster reports having found “little boxes” at a home appliance store. “I’m optimistic that this will work,” Förster writes. The 2012 and 2011 papers describe having study subjects touch an object “that consisted of four square plastic boxes.” Verhoeven has confirmed to Science that these e-mails discussing details of studies seemingly described in the 2011 and 2012 paper are genuine. “Reading back our correspondence 5 years later, I can only conclude we were still working on the exact design of the experiments in May 2009,” says Verhoeven, now an interior designer in Amsterdam, who says he has no animosity toward Förster. He provided the e-mails only after Förster’s accuser approached him. Förster’s accuser has also informed UvA that six more of his papers contain statistically improbable data. UvA, however, tells Science that it will take no action because there has been no filing of a “new, formal, and substantiated” complaint. In lieu of any new investigation, colleagues are judging Förster themselves, often posting their views online. For example, psychologist Uri Simonsohn of the University of Pennsylvania, whose statistical analysis of the data published by psychologist Dirk Smeesters of Erasmus University Rotterdam exposed his scientific misconduct, joined with Leif Nelson of University of California, Berkeley, to analyze the 2012 paper. On 8 May on the blog datacolada.org, they describe conducting 100,000 data simulations and other statistical analyses to examine how likely the results are. “[W]e have a conceptual replication of ‘these data are not real,’ ” they concluded. Förster has not responded to Science’s multiple attempts to reach him. As the psychology community mulls the bewildering tale, he awaits word from Ruhr University Bochum, which has postponed plans for him to start a professorship endowed with €5 million in funding from the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The university and the foundation now say they may not address the matter until October. ■ Frank van Kolfschooten is a freelance writer in Amsterdam and the author of two books on scientific misconduct. sciencemag.org SCIENCE
30 MAY 2014 • VOL 344 ISSUE 6187
Published by AAAS
overruns for the international fusion experiment ITER under construction in Cadarache, France. “The facility construction and day-to-day project management should stay in the hands of DOE,” says a staffer with the Democratic majority in the Senate. “We don’t want to repeat project management problems that have plagued ITER, and we don’t want to overly complicate a billiondollar-class science construction project.” However, James Siegrist, DOE’s associate director for high-energy physics, says CERN’s successful LHC collaboration can serve as a model for a U.S.-based project: “I’m pretty confident we can figure this out.” The P5 report also recommends increasing funding for smaller underground experiments to detect particles of dark matter. But it calls for an end to current R&D efforts to develop a collider that smashes muons, heavier unstable cousins of electrons, and several other projects. Money could strain P5’s global plan. P5
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY
Jens Förster can’t provide original data on studies.
Psychologist’s defense challenged E-mails counter claimed location, timing of studies
The international approach may be key to securing Fermilab’s future.
By Frank van Kolfschooten
PHOTOS: (LEFT) REIDAR HAHN/FERMILAB; (RIGHT) HUMBOLDT-STIFTUNG/SVEN MÜLLER
W one-third the size of the previous proposal, located at the surface. P5 now says researchers should scrap that attenuated plan and start over with a bigger international effort. That most likely means the project would have to answer to an international council like the one that governs CERN, says Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “The U.S. government has to accept that it has to give up something in the way they normally do things,” he says. Rolf Heuer, director-general of CERN, says such an arrangement would be very important for European physicists. “An international project is not one where I say what I’m going to do and you can do it, too,” Heuer says. “It’s one where the participants are on the same eye level.” That approach may be hard to sell to Congress, especially as it deals with huge cost
considered three budget scenarios: One in which DOE’s particle physics budget, now $797 million, increases by a meager 5% over 10 years, one in which it increases by 17% over 10 years, and one in which it is unlimited. In the first two cases, the United States could contribute only R&D money and some hardware to the ILC. If the United States doesn’t play ball on the ILC, then Japan could opt for its own proposed neutrino experiment. “That’s a challenge for the strategy,” says HEPAP’s Lankford, although he says the U.S. project might be able to go ahead without Japan. DOE officials hope the plan will help unify the factious U.S. particle community. “It’s the right fit for this global picture,” Siegrist says. “So hopefully people will recognize that.” ■
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
ith a once distinguished career, a €5 million grant, and a new professorship all hanging in the balance, social psychologist Jens Förster has vigorously fought back against recent charges that some of his results are so statistically improbable that they could only have resulted from data manipulation. But a key element of his defense has also exposed Förster, who recently resigned from the University of Amsterdam (UvA), to a new line of attack. E-mails reviewed by Science call into question his assertion that some of the studies at the heart of the controversy were not conducted recently at UvA but were done much earlier in Germany over a decadelong period ending in 2008. In explaining certain puzzling aspects of the study subjects, and his inability to provide the original data files on them, Förster had said the studies took place long ago at another institution. The e-mails between Förster and a UvA colleague discuss how to conduct various aspects of some of those studies—yet the e-mails were sent in May 2009, undercutting Förster’s timeline. This perplexing saga began in 2012 when another psychologist expressed concern to UvA about unusually large effects that seemed improbably consistent, reported in 40 studies described in three papers. After participants had been “primed” by subtle stimuli, such as hearing poems, their scores 30 MAY 2014 • VOL 344 ISSUE 6187
Published by AAAS
957
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on June 2, 2015
40,000 tonnes of frigid liquid argon and set 1480 meters down in an abandoned gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. It would study how the “flavors” of neutrinos morph into one another as they zing along at near light speed. The experiment’s main goal would be to spot an asymmetry between the behavior of neutrinos and antineutrinos that could help explain how the universe generated so much more matter than antimatter. Fermilab researchers already had a plan for such a project, called the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE). In 2012, Fermilab physicists presented a design for a neutrino detector filled with 34,000 tonnes of liquid argon in the mine. The underground detector also could have looked for signs that protons in the liquid argon decay—a key prediction of some theories— and spotted neutrinos from supernovas. But DOE officials balked at LBNE’s $1.5 billion price tag. So, Fermilab physicists proposed a $789 million version with a detector less than
NEWS | I N D E P T H
This 2009 e-mail between Jens Förster and his research assistant seemingly discusses plans for a study Förster says was already completed by 2008.
on a cognitive ability test rose significantly. The complaint sparked a UvA investigation that delved into the statistics of Förster’s publications and found some “virtually impossible” results in papers published in 2009, 2011, and 2012, but did not conclude misconduct. A second inquiry, by the Netherlands’ National Board for Research Integrity, did conclude that data had been manipulated in the 2012 paper published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, however. UvA has recommended that that paper be retracted, but Förster has not acceded. In addition to questioning Förster’s results, the person who filed the complaint had expressed skepticism about the recorded information on the study subjects, noting, for example, that the sex ratio of the participants was very different from that among students at UvA. The psychologist also found it suspicious that the 2012 paper and two others recorded not a single study dropout, out of more than 2200 participants across 40 experiments, and not a single participant who had guessed the purpose of the study—even though many of them were presumably psychology students at UvA. In a 11 May posting on his website, Förster reiterated a previous denial of data manipulation and stressed that his challenger had made a key mistaken assumption—the studies documented in the 2011 and 2012 papers, Förster says, were conducted from 1999 to 2008 in Germany, mostly at Jacobs University Bremen, with the help of more than 150 co-workers. Förster further hinted that one of those people might have manufactured the exceptional results. “I can also not exclude the possibility that the data has been manipulated by someone involved in the data collection or data processing. … During the time of investigation I tried to figure out who could have done something inappropriate. However, I had to accept that there is no chance to trace this back; after all, the stud958
“I can only conclude we were still working on the exact design of the experiments in May 2009.” Pieter Verhoeven
ies were run more than 7 years ago and I am not even entirely sure when, and I worked with too many people,” he wrote. In an earlier posting on 29 April, Förster wrote that he had thrown away the original questionnaires for the challenged studies when he moved to a much smaller office in Amsterdam. (In that posting, he did not note where the studies were done.) In his 11 May statement, Förster noted that he provided both investigations with processed data files, one of which contained questionnaire answers in German, which he says proves the experiments were performed in Germany and not in Amsterdam as had been assumed. Those files are time-stamped February 2013, however, according to Förster’s challenger and a second source, who has access to the data files but does not want to be named. Förster’s accuser says the integrity committee of UvA should have asked for data files with a time stamp before September 2012, when the complaint was filed. He also says the UvA erred by not confiscating Förster’s computer, as often happens in such investigations. (The whistleblower’s identity is known to Förster, the university, and the national investigating body, but he agreed to talk to Science only if not named.) The real challenge to Förster’s timeline may lie in e-mails between him and Pieter Verhoeven, his research assistant at UvA from September 2008 to June 2009, who made the correspondence available to Förster’s accuser. In it, the two discuss how to conduct
what are evidently the same experiments Förster’s blog declares were completed much earlier in Bremen. For instance, among the stimuli used are three unintelligible audio recordings, which the 2011 paper says were described to the subjects as “Moldavian” poems. In an 18 May 2009 e-mail, Verhoeven comes up with the idea to describe the poem that way, rather than as Malaysian, because the reader of the poem has a German accent. In another e-mail, sent to Verhoeven on 13 May 2009, Förster reports having found “little boxes” at a home appliance store. “I’m optimistic that this will work,” Förster writes. The 2012 and 2011 papers describe having study subjects touch an object “that consisted of four square plastic boxes.” Verhoeven has confirmed to Science that these e-mails discussing details of studies seemingly described in the 2011 and 2012 paper are genuine. “Reading back our correspondence 5 years later, I can only conclude we were still working on the exact design of the experiments in May 2009,” says Verhoeven, now an interior designer in Amsterdam, who says he has no animosity toward Förster. He provided the e-mails only after Förster’s accuser approached him. Förster’s accuser has also informed UvA that six more of his papers contain statistically improbable data. UvA, however, tells Science that it will take no action because there has been no filing of a “new, formal, and substantiated” complaint. In lieu of any new investigation, colleagues are judging Förster themselves, often posting their views online. For example, psychologist Uri Simonsohn of the University of Pennsylvania, whose statistical analysis of the data published by psychologist Dirk Smeesters of Erasmus University Rotterdam exposed his scientific misconduct, joined with Leif Nelson of University of California, Berkeley, to analyze the 2012 paper. On 8 May on the blog datacolada.org, they describe conducting 100,000 data simulations and other statistical analyses to examine how likely the results are. “[W]e have a conceptual replication of ‘these data are not real,’ ” they concluded. Förster has not responded to Science’s multiple attempts to reach him. As the psychology community mulls the bewildering tale, he awaits word from Ruhr University Bochum, which has postponed plans for him to start a professorship endowed with €5 million in funding from the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The university and the foundation now say they may not address the matter until October. ■ Frank van Kolfschooten is a freelance writer in Amsterdam and the author of two books on scientific misconduct. sciencemag.org SCIENCE
30 MAY 2014 • VOL 344 ISSUE 6187
Published by AAAS
