This was an awful thing to do. It was damaging to innocent participants. It is unethical to do this to your participants. It is wildly unethical to invite people to participate in a study, and then do this to them. They are helping us. They are volunteering to participate in scientific research. They've take time out of their lives to help us out. And in return, we slander them? We tell the world that they believe things that they do not believe? What Lewandowsky and colleagues did here was despicable and fraudulent. Why would anyone participate in a social psychology study if this is what we do to them? Why would anyone participate in research if our goal is to marginalize them in public life, to lie about them, to say that they think the moon landing was a hoax, to say they don't think HIV causes AIDS, to say they don't believe smoking causes lung cancer – when none of those things are true. Do we hate our participants?
Social psychologist Jose Duarte considers Lewandowsky's Moon Hoax paper.
Bishop Hill
Judith Curry has a must-read post looking at one of Joe Duarte's own papers.
If left unchecked, an academic field can become a cohesive moral community, creating a shared reality that subsequently blinds its members to morally or ideologically undesirable hypotheses and unanswered but important scientific questions.