Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for December 2024, Julien Larregue (Université Laval, Canada). His article for Current Sociology Sentencing social psychology: Scientific deviance and the diffusion of statistical rules is Open Access.

Julien Larregue

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “Sentencing social psychology: Scientific deviance and the diffusion of statistical rules”?

J. Larregue: There is much discourse on “frauds” and “questionable” practices in science, and yet we know very little about it from a sociological perspective. Scientists tend to have little awareness of how their position within the social world, including in academia, might influence their understanding of what I would call scientific deviance. Their views on the matter tend to be moralistic and criminalizing in a way that’s reminiscent of what we have observed in the handling of “public problems” (cf. Gusfield) in the broader society. The process they implement is very typical in this regard: finding the culprits, identifying the causes of their actions, and neutralizing the negative consequences that could follow such behaviors (hence the retraction movement). Yet we seldom discuss the origins and implementation of the rules that delineate what deviance is, and what is at stake in such definitions. Using a very publicized case of “fraud” that took place in social psychology, one that left little doubt about the “culpability” of the accused researcher, I endeavored in this article to shift the analytical focus onto the accusers.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

J. Larregue: One key finding in this study of a “fraud” case is that much of the rules that were applied by the committees during their investigations did not already exist in social psychology. When drawing the boundaries between good and bad scientific practices, institutions and academics dealing with scientific misconduct participate to construct a certain conception of what science should be. Stapel’s sanctioned behavior constituted an opportunity for the investigating committees to impose and apply statistical rules in a research field (social psychology) that was regulated on the basis of divergent methodological assumptions. Hence, far from being ‘no more than the mouth that pronounces the words of the law’, as Montesquieu’s famous aphorism had it, the committees actively participated to extend the scope of application of statistical rules. In so doing, they also transformed Stapel’s individual responsibility into a collective responsibility: the research culture of social psychology was as guilty – perhaps more, even – as the Dutch professor.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate?

J. Larregue: One clear implication of this research is to raise a flag about the imperialist methodological evangelism that undergirds much of the discourses and actions about “fraud” and “questionable research practices”. Statisticians and “meta-scientists,” as they sometimes call themselves, disregard disciplinary differences and the fact that diverse sets of methods and epistemological practices are used across the social sciences. Not everyone uses a hypothetico-deductive approach to then perform very specific laboratory experiments with a population of undergraduate students. Yet the imagined solutions that these scholars promote are constantly based on this restricted view of science: pre-registration, replication, open data, methodological review boards… What are qualitative researchers and quantitative researchers who do not conduct laboratory experiments – that is, the vast majority of social scientists – supposed to do with that? This is very ill-suited to their lived reality and, more often than not, in contradiction with their views on what good science is.