The Catwalk and the Mousetrap: Reading Diederik Stapel’s Derailment as a Misconduct Novel

Abstract

Diederik Stapel (1966) was a Dutch social psychologist who obtained his Ph.D. cum laude at the University of Amsterdam (in 1997), became professor of social psychology at the University of Groningen (in 2000) and subsequently at Tilburg (in 2006). Here, he was appointed as Director of the Tilburg Institute for Behavioural Economics research (TIBER) and as Dean of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. In 2011, however, he formally and publicly admitted to having fabricated and manipulated data for at least 55 publications, from 2003 onwards. Because of the prominence of the perpetrator and the astounding scale of the fraud, Stapelgate quickly became a widely publicised and discussed misconduct case, both in the Netherlands and abroad, − and something of an epistemic trauma: for academic research in general and for social psychology in particular. Indeed, the name Stapel became synonymous with scientific fraud as such. After his formal dismissal and public condemnation (by a triad of committees established by three universities to investigate the case in depth), Stapel became marginalised and fell into a deep depression. Yet, in 2012 he resurfaced with an autobiographical account in Dutch entitled Ontsporing (Derailment), the first in a series of literary books written in the wake of his exposure, containing reflections on his experiences from a first-person perspective (Stapel 2012).