The dog-rape study is supposed to have resulted from nearly 1,000 hours of observation at three dog parks in southeast Portland. The dildo paper pretends to draw from multihour interviews with 13 men—eight straight, two bisexual, three gay—about their sexual behaviors. And the breastaurant research claims to have its basis in a two-year-long project carried out in northern Florida, involving men whose educational backgrounds, ages, and marital statuses were duly recorded and reported.
How absurd was it for such work to get an airing? It may sound silly to investigate the rates at which dog owners intervene in public humping incidents, but that doesn’t mean it’s a total waste of time (as psychologist
Daniel Lakens pointed out on Twitter). If the findings had been real, they would have some value irrespective of the pablum that surrounds them in the paper’s introduction and discussion sections. Indeed, one can
point to lots of silly-sounding published data from
many other fields of study, including strictly scientific ones. Are those emblematic of “corruption” too?
It’s true that Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian tricked some journals into putting out made-up data, but this says nothing whatsoever about the fields they chose to target. One could have run this sting on almost any empirical discipline and returned the same result. We know from long experience that expert peer review offers close to
no protection against outright data fraud, whether in the field of gender studies or
cancer research,
psychology or
plant biology,
crystallography or
condensed matter physics. Even shoddy paste-up jobs with
duplicated images and other
slacker fakes have made their way to print and helped establish researchers’ careers. So what if these hoaxers did the same for fun? These examples haven’t hoodwinked anyone with sophistry or satire but with a simple fabrication of results.
Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian employed this made-up-data method for five of their 21 papers, and three of those were accepted for publication—yielding a hoax-success rate of 60 percent. When they wrote up papers without this added layer of deception, just four of 16 were accepted.