This morning, an official enquiry into the scientific conduct of professor Mart Bax concluded that he had committed large-scale scientific fraud over a period of 15 years. Mart Bax is a now-retired professor of political anthropology at the Free University Amsterdam. In 2012 a journalist first accused him of fraud, and this spring, the Volkskrant, one of the big newspapers in the Netherlands reported they were not able to find any of the informants Mart Bax had used in his studies.
Social scientists (and psychology in particular) have in recent years had somethings of a bad press, both in- and outside academia. To give some examples:
- There is a sense among some people that social science provides little societal or economical value. - Controversy over research findings within social science: for example the findings of Bem et al. about the existence of precognition , or the estimation of the number of casualties in Iraq war (2003-2007).