Stephen Gibson, Honorary Secretary of the Society's Social Psychology Section, has a letter in this week's Times Higher Education defending social psychology.

He writes: "there are no grounds for concluding either that research fraud is any more common in social psychology than other disciplines or that its editorial processes are particularly poor at detecting it."

The questioning of social psychology arose from the report of the Levelt, Noort and Drenth committees into the fraudulent research practices of the social psychologist Diederik Stapel. That report suggested "there are certain aspects of the discipline itself that should be deemed undesirable or even incorrect from the perspective of academic standards and scientific integrity".

However, Stephen Gibson writes:

"We have strong concerns that these conclusions are unwarranted in so far as they paint a picture of the field as seriously and uniquely compromised. As has been pointed out by Wolfgang Stroebe, Tom Postmes and Russell Spears in a recent issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, there are no grounds for concluding either that research fraud is any more common in social psychology than other disciplines or that its editorial processes are particularly poor at detecting it. They point out that fraud in all disciplines is typically identified only by the actions of whistleblowers rather than through the peer-review system."

You can read the full letter on the Times Higher Education site.