I had long regarded the Piltdown fake as a unique product of the Edwardian age. Now I am not so sure. Some of the most famous “discoveries” in psychology are also being exposed — sometimes decades after the fact — as distorted, misreported or exaggerated to a disturbing degree. For a while, it seemed that 1950-1975 was a heroic age of psychological research, in which bold — if ethically questionable — findings seared themselves on the public consciousness. There was the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, in which student volunteers were invited by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo to act out the roles of prisoners and prison guards. The study swiftly deteriorated into dehumanising abuse, as the guards embraced their role as fascist thugs with too much enthusiasm.