The Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser was "solely responsible" for eight instances of scientific misconduct in his lab, a university committee has found, according to an e-mail message sent to faculty members on Friday by the university's dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The message is the fullest account provided by the university so far of the investigation into Mr. Hauser's work. Ever since news of the investigation was broken by The Boston Globe, the university has been criticized for remaining mostly silent on the nature of the allegations.
In the message, the dean, Michael D. Smith, said that after "careful review of the investigating committee's confidential report and opportunities for Professor Hauser to respond, I accepted the committee's findings and immediately moved to fulfill our obligations to the funding agencies and scientific community and to impose appropriate sanctions."
He did not reveal what those sanctions are, though he writes that possible sanctions could include "involuntary leave, the imposition of additional oversight on a faculty member's research lab, and appropriately severe restrictions on a faculty member's ability to apply for research grants, to admit graduate students, and to supervise undergraduate research." Mr. Hauser is currently on leave from Harvard.
The message says, as had already been reported, that there were problems with three published papers, which are being either corrected or retracted. But it also says that there were issues with five other studies that never made it to publication. The problems with both the published and unpublished studies included "data acquisition, data analysis, data retention, and the reporting of research methodologies and results."
An internal document obtained this week by The Chronicle told the story of how research assistants and a graduate student in Mr. Hauser's laboratory went to administrators after becoming convinced that the professor was reporting bogus data. In that case, the study in question was never published.
Dean Smith's message says that the university is cooperating with inquiries by the Office of Research Integrity in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, by the National Science Foundation's Office of Inspector General, and by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts.
Mr. Hauser has so far said nothing publicly about the allegations. The professor is director of Harvard's Cognitive Evolution Laboratory and is the author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (Ecco, 2006) and is at work on a forthcoming book titled Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad. He has been voted one of the university's most popular professors.
Update (August 21, 10:50 a.m., U.S. Eastern time): In a statement he released late Friday, Professor Hauser acknowledged only that he had made "some significant mistakes," not that he had committed the research misconduct of which he has been accused. He also said he was "deeply sorry for the problems this case has caused to my students, my colleagues, and my university."
Comments
1. amnirov - August 20, 2010 at 04:12 pm
Uh, perhaps they should revoke his tenure and fire him. What a waste of a good academic job.
2. ychassiakos - August 20, 2010 at 04:23 pm
"Dead Air" by Deborah Shlian MD and Linda Reid MD addresses the tragic impact of research malfeasance at a fictional New England University. A timely warning that examines one possible outcome of ethical misconduct. Well worth reading.
3. newhill - August 20, 2010 at 04:57 pm
Something must have happened between writing his first book and conceptualizing the second one. A bit ironic.
4. arrive2__net - August 20, 2010 at 05:21 pm
Obviously it is critical to maintain high standards of research integrity, although it is not always easy because grants, jobs, careera, and especially egos are involved. If this finding is right, then kudos to the students and assistants who had the nerve to make an issue of it. I have to think more highly of Harvard in the future. Many institutions would sweep something like that under the carpet to save embarassment to themselves. On the face of it, it takes an honorable institution to do what Harvard did.
Having said all that, I am still keeping in mind that the prof should be able to make a public statement if he is going to defend himself. You have to hear from both sides to get to the truth.
Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net
5. cwinton - August 20, 2010 at 05:30 pm
I'm glad to see that Harvard is finally owning up to this, since the extent to which they have drawn out their investigation (well over 2 years) can only have increased the negative impact on this particular research community. In taking so long to acknowledge the rather obvious problems in Mr. Hauser's work, it strikes me that Harvard was hoping to somehow whitewash the whole affair, regardless of the potential for damage to others who relied on the integrity of the assertions being made by Mr. Hauser. They may well have been surprised by the extent of his malfeasance, nonetheless, they should have uncovered enough warning flags in the first few months of their inquiry to at least alert those potentially affected, if for no other reason to protect their own reputation. By allowing this problem to fester until their cover was blown by the press leaves the distinct impression that Harvard is loathe to hold researchers to any standard, much less a higher standard.
6. 11127786 - August 20, 2010 at 05:43 pm
For me, the sad part is the collateral damage to Hauser's co-auhors, former and current graduate students.
7. formerprof05 - August 20, 2010 at 07:37 pm
Normally, I have more empathy for anyone who is subject to academia's unrealistic(?) demands for publication. I recall a promotion committee's debate about whether a colleague should be granted tenure despite her being unable to publish one study that indicated no statistically significant results. The committee recommended tenure, reasoning that her study's results were significant precisely because it showed no statistically positive correlation.
Yet, in this instance and in these times, I conclude that Harvard should fire Hauser and replace him with a tenure-seeking candidate who is presumably more worthy. If Hauser is really that clever, his career, perhaps outside academia, won't come to an end.
8. daneverett - August 20, 2010 at 09:39 pm
If you lied in your use of federal funds and to your fellow researchers, then you are the academic equivalent of an athlete using steroids, an embezzling accountant, a lawyer inventing bribing witnesses. These are transgressions for which you are expelled from your profession.
9. ivylib - August 21, 2010 at 07:57 am
Couple things: I wonder if anyone could publish a brilliant, well-founded scholarly work that is 'evilicious.' Second, this confirms my sense that people go into fields seeking answers to what is wrong with them and want to correct. It isn't just a coincidence that the most heavily hit area of theft in academic libraries is ethics. Of course my 'research' on that is based solely on over a decade of working in ivy league libraries and there are no pressures for me to write that. Neither are there other young careers at stake. I hope the forthcoming book does come out and we can all read it and realize that entertainment is made of such. Time to come clean.
10. janyregina - August 21, 2010 at 06:53 pm
Evaluations do matter. Irony intended!
The research sounds interesting. Why do people enjoy being evil? Is the answer in behaviorism through conditioning watching others enjoy their evilness? Are we genetically programmed to steal? Then, we need to define ownership. Native Americans thought all owned the land. There is a difference in that frisson one gets in being a little bad and being amoral.
Research is misunderstood. I noticed he admitted his mistakes were "significant." Often, the researcher is simply trying to prove that which he/she knows to be true. Bad science.
11. richardtaborgreene - August 23, 2010 at 07:37 am
I am sorry the scholars are not more loyal to truth above all else. I am sorry the societies that create and surround them are so hell-bent on tempting everyone never to be loyal to truth over anything else. In the vile culture around him, his actions are just conformity to social norms, unfortunately those social norms are suicidally meretricious. Sad man, sad society, sad Harvard, but good not-sad grad students who for brief moments flickered with that loyalty to truth above nation, family, religions, background that gave birth to our first scientific societies centuries ago. I love that dream and feel (not enough datasets) that our contemporary social disrespect for and disinterest in it will hurt us terribly in the end.
12. 22228715 - August 23, 2010 at 08:32 am
Interesting that he was voted to be so popular. I wonder WHY he was popular, and whether those traits or actions are consistent with or contrary to the less desirable behavior in his lab. Can one be a poor researcher and a good teacher?
13. judithryan43 - August 23, 2010 at 09:36 am
Wouldn't that depend on how one defines "good teaching"?
14. 12080243 - August 23, 2010 at 12:27 pm
Yes, a couple of years is a long time to conduct an investigation, but unlike Harvard, the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) promotes misconduct and petty corruption and punishes anyone who dares to bring non-public relations information to the attention of administrators or the public. Call if a failure of strength of character, academic weakness, not knowing right from wrong, whatever, the fact remains that there are many differences between Harvard and the University of Southern Mississippi and none of them are attributes to be proud of. See, for example, "University and AACSB Diversity", published in the proceedings of the American Accounting Association 2010 Annual Meeting (http://commons.aaahq.org/post/3d4bfd4201). The research reports the punishment of a professor who brought to the attention of USM faculty and administrators, and then to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), faculty plagiarism. As a matter of fact, the College of Business at USM still reports an Academic Integrity Policy on its website that it took from Syracuse University "without proper citation"--a term used by the faculty plagiarizers. Note that Syracuse provided an extensive list of citations for the sources of the ideas and words of its Academic Integrity Policy but when USM's College of Business copied Syracuse's Academic Integrity Policy, its faculty and administrators did not copy the citation list or give credit to Syracuse.
Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA
Professor
School of Accountancy
College of Business
University of Southern Mississippi
m.depree@usm.edu
www.usmnews.net
15. smencil - August 23, 2010 at 12:36 pm
Dr. Hauser has 93 peer reviewed publications accoriding to PsycINFO. If 3 of the (published) studies have problems, I'd like to know exactly what the problem is before I'd recommend firing him. The explanation in previous Chronicile artcles made it sound like his RAs compared their coding with his using the wrong column or he either fabricated data. One is a mistake (which would be bad but not impossible over 93 studies) and one is serious deceit. But we still don't know exactly what he did wrong.
16. dank48 - August 23, 2010 at 03:20 pm
Tedious, isn't it, the way due process takes up so much time?
17. zmdvwbs7 - August 23, 2010 at 10:09 pm
I seriously disagree with smencil.
Harvard has found serious problems with 3% of Hauser's papers. This does not imply that Harvard failed to find serious problems with 97% of Hauser's papers.
It is more likely that Harvard carefully studied 3 papers and found serious problems with 100% of them. The remaining 94 papers are suspect.
Hauser's credibility has been destroyed. He is now useless to Harvard. Harvard could easily replace Hauser with a researcher with zero suspect papers.
18. rweinel - August 24, 2010 at 05:23 am
Well, what troubles me most - according to smencil "Dr. Hauser has 93 peer reviewed publications according to PsycINFO". So, no matter if there are three publications with serious problems - or possibly even more, as zmdvwbs7 suggests - what does this tell us about the value of peer review? Peer reviews creates a lot of extra work load for everyone, but cases like this one really make you wonder if it's worth it. Any suggestions on this?
19. mfortuna - August 24, 2010 at 11:07 am
Peer review may need to include queries re. reproducibility of work.