Rotterdam Marketing Psychologist Resigns After University …

Clever statistical sleuthing by an anonymous fraud hunter in the United States appears to have led to the downfall of a marketing researcher at Erasmus
University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Today, the university announced in a statement (Dutch) that Belgian-born social
psychologist Dirk Smeesters, who specialized in consumer behavior, resigned effective 21 June after an investigative panel found problems in his studies
and concluded it had "no confidence in [their] scientific integrity." The university has also asked for the retraction of two of Smeesters' papers, one
published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in January and the other in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology last year.

Smeesters, a professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, could not be reached for comment today, but the university panel's report (Dutch), provided by a university
spokesperson, says he conceded to "massaging" the data in some papers to "strengthen" outcomes, while defending his actions as common in his field. The
case seems certain to further undermine confidence in social psychology, a field struggling to show that its findings are reproducible, and comes while the Dutch
academic world is still recovering from the affair involving social psychologist Diederik Stapel, who made up data for dozens of papers according to investigative panels. Smeesters has
worked at Tilburg University, Stapel's academic home, for several years but the two did not collaborate, and the cases appear to be unrelated. There are
several parallels, however.

Like Stapel, Smeesters led a number of high-profile studies, which,

as Smeesters noted on his home page
, were covered by many international news outlets. Some of his catchy research topics were

whether models that look like the girl-next-door might be better than Kate Moss
, the effects of messiness (also a topic Stapel explored), and whether death-related media stories might make consumers prefer domestic brands.
Like Stapel, Smeesters often collected and analyzed his data alone, even when collaborating with other researchers who helped design the studies, according
to the university panel's report.

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