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The occasional news item about a fraudulent researcher just reinforces the idea that scientific malpractice consists of a tiny number of evil researchers who clearly violate scientific standards by fabricating data and that all other researchers do a great job.
In reality, most bad science consists of fairly subtle manipulations or bad practices like p-hacking, tiny data sets, misrepresenting the actual findings, measuring the wrong thing, etc. Much of this is due to incompetence, where the researchers get taught 'this one weird trick' which is good enough to get their papers accepted, but without actually understanding what the strengths and weaknesses of their method(s).
This incompetence is fueled by the scientific reward system rewarding those that do bad science and punishing those who do good science (limited by the ability to get away with BS, which is why fields like physics are a lot better, because engineers and the companies that employ them call out scientists when they can't make working things that are based on the scientific discoveries).
Convincing people whose worldview is based on trust that our elites take good care of us, based on mostly solid science, that science is fundamentally broken and most money spend on it is wasted, is quite hard though.
Perhaps, if every fraudulent researcher found themselves as news items, or if academic research appropriately handled the well-established cases as they're discovered.
This is an old post, but I'll highlight it for three reasons: you've never heard of the researcher (and I'd never heard of the entire university), it hit a 'hard' science field, and (most unusually) the publisher explicitly and publicly said they weren't going to treat fraud as fraud where usually that's just decided privately.
I can only demonstrate clear intentional fault in a small portion of all papers and don't know how prevalent this is, that's fair. No one knows how prevalent this is. Attempts to discover research fraud occur almost entirely at the hobbyist level, and the people trying to catch that overt fraud are dependent on tells like photoshop goofups or division errors, with only rare opportunities to see the raw data. Ariely's only coming to light after failed replications, followed by the man sending over Excel spreadsheets with the fakest data imaginable. There's basically zero institutional interest in discussing even the highest-profile and most explicit fraudsters. It's not that we're only seeing the crashes; we're only seeing the crashes that happen in the middle of the city, after which the pilot steps out of the aircraft and recites a five-stanza poem about how they mismanaged the flight. We don't know if the fraud is extremely rare or it's as common as the bad-but-not-fraudulent science.
I agree with and recognize that a lot of people have been trained to do bad-but-not-fraudulent science. I'll caveat that this division isn't always so cut-and-dry -- Wansink is my go-to for salami-slicing, but there's some evidence at least a couple of his studies depended on fabricated data rather than 'just' p-hacking -- but it is relevant to keep in mind.
As I perhaps mention too often, you can come at it from the other end as well. The scientific method, as commonly understood, should preclude the creation and maintenance of entirely fictitious fields of study. If such fields can be observed to exist, that's strong evidence that the process as a whole is fundamentally broken, even if you can't identify the specific steps where the problem lies.
There is actually no common understanding of the scientific method. What Judith Butler does is not comparable in any meaningful way to the work of Ferenc Krausz (and his team). Yet they both claim to do science, even though the work of one of them is not falsifiable.
Part of the charade that allows these nonsensical fields and subfields to exist is the claim that all the professors who work at universities do proper science, even when they do no such thing.
And the ideal scientific method is just aspirational anyway. In reality we cannot achieve that perfection even for physics. When it comes to fields that do not provide the preconditions that allow us to apply something a bit close to the ideal scientific method, people simply use less rigorous methods. Until you get to Judith Butler where claims just get conjured up with bad logic, misrepresentations of what others actually proved, etc.
And like gattsuru says, there is a disturbing lack of interest by institutions (and voters) in even figuring out how well those who call themselves scientists actually do their jobs. Researchers with good morals who do look into it, invariably find highly disturbing results.
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