The German Society of Psychology (DGPs) today announced that the court of honor has put an end to its investigation on Jens Förster after they mutually agreed to the retraction of two papers in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General:1
By this [agreement] the proceedings against Prof. Dr. Jens Förster at the court of honor at the German Society of Psychology will be concluded. Prof. Förster is obliged to act upon the publishers of the Journal of Experimental Psychology to pursue a retraction of the following to publications:
Förster, J. (2009). Relations between perceptual and conceptual scope: How global versus local processing fits a focus on similarity versus dissimilarity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138(1), 88-111. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0014484
Förster, J. (2011). Local and global cross-modal influences between vision and hearing, tasting, smelling, or touching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140(3), 364-389. dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0023175
This settlement is neither a confession of guilt by Prof. Förster nor an imputation of blame by the court of honor.
Past analyses and reports have hinted at a possible scientific misconduct, but he always denied those claims. However, this settlement is rather strange to me: either there is sufficient evidence of fake data or very questionable practices or there is none. In the first case, an investigation should formally be started to identify any publication that might be based on those data. And in the latter case a retraction seems unreasonable – what reason should a retraction have in that case? Especially when both parties are so eager to underline that no confession of guilt or blame is made.
Seems like I’m not the only one wondering about this course of events:
Er… Weird https://t.co/YN0XrZVb7v
— Andrew D Wilson is now @adw.bsky.social (@PsychScientists) November 12, 2015
https://twitter.com/JPdeRuiter/status/664705810795257856
I’m pretty sure that this is not the end of the discussion and that there will be other investigations.
- Translated by yours truly. ↩