Faking Science: A True Story of Academic Fraud

Foreword to the Dutch editionI’ve spun off, lost my way, crashed and burned; whatever you want to call it. It’s not much fun. I was doing fine, but then I became impatient, overambitious, reckless. I wanted to go faster and better and higher and smarter, all the time. I thought it would help if I just took this one tiny little shortcut, but then I found myself more and more often in completely the wrong lane, and in the end I wasn’t even on the road at all. I left the road where I should have gone straight on, and made my own, spectacular, destructive, fatal accident. I’ve ruined my life, but that’s not the worst of it. My recklessness left a multiple pile-up in its wake, which caught up almost everyone important to me: my wife and children, my parents and siblings, colleagues, students, my doctoral candidates, the university, psychology, science, all involved, all hurt or damaged to some degree or other. That’s the worst part, and it’s something I’m going to have to learn to live with for the rest of my life, along with the shame and guilt. I’ve got more regrets than hairs on my head, and an infinite amount of time to think about them.This book is an attempt to reconstruct my spin-off and the inevitable crash into a very solid wall that followed it. Hopefully this reconstruction will allow for a better understanding of what happened, for me but also for others who want to know. What did I do? How did it start? And why did it get so stupidly out of control? And, above all: who am I, really? Or perhaps, if I’m lucky: who was I, really?So, this book is not intended to be a witness statement or a charge sheet. It’s not a research report and it’s not a comment on other research reports. This is my own, personal, selective, biased story about my downfall. It’s nothing more than a series of images, sketches, thoughts, and anecdotes, which together form an attempt to understand myself (and maybe find myself again?). It started more or less by chance, as a bit of occupational therapy. I’d been fired, was stuck at home, hated myself, been feeling depressed for months. Writing kept me busy, plus—as I knew from some piece of psychological research I’d read somewhere one time—writing about a bad experience helps your recovery from that experience. So I started writing my thoughts and feelings in a small black notebook.