The Boston Globe broke the story this week that a Harvard University psychology professor, Marc Hauser, was under investigation for possible academic misconduct. Mr. Hauser is a prominent researcher and a popular professor who has written successful mainstream books like Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. He’s a big deal.
Since then, rumors have been flying, but Harvard officials have remained mum. The university at first was unwilling to confirm that Hauser was, in fact, being investigated. But Thursday afternoon the university sent this carefully worded statement to a few reporters:
Harvard has always taken seriously its obligation to maintain the integrity of the scientific record. The University has rigorous systems in place to evaluate concerns about scientific work by Harvard faculty members. Those procedures were employed in Dr. Hauser’s situation. As a result of that process, and in accordance with standard practice, Harvard has taken steps to ensure that the scientific record is corrected in relation to three articles co-authored by Dr. Hauser.
While Dr. Hauser (or in one instance, his colleague) were directed to explain the issues with these articles to the academic journals that published those papers, the University has also welcomed specific questions from the editors involved. We will continue to assist the editors in this process. In these types of cases, Harvard follows federal requirements for investigating alleged research misconduct and reports its findings, as required, to the appropriate federal funding agencies, which conduct their own review. At the conclusion of the federal investigatory process, in cases where the government concludes scientific misconduct occurred, the federal agency makes those findings publicly available.
The agency that would handle such allegations is the Office of Research Integrity at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which publishes the results of its investigations on its Web site. The office also has the power to ban researchers from receiving federal funding. How long an investigation of Mr. Hauser might take is anyone’s guess.
Meanwhile, Mr. Hauser—who, in the wake of the investigation, is on leave—isn’t talking. Neither are those who worked with him in his lab. But plenty of other people are speculating on what is being called “Hausergate” on Twitter. This story is getting a lot of attention for a numbers of reasons: (1) It’s Harvard. (2) Marc Hauser is a big name. (3) If his research really is shaky, then this could have real implications for the field.
One of the most interesting posts on the Hauser investigation I’ve come across is from this blog, which gives some (anonymous) examples of how questionable and even outright false data can make its way into journals. It suggests that maybe there’s a bigger story here about the integrity of the peer-review process.
12 Responses to Harvard Confirms ‘Hausergate’
11147066 - August 13, 2010 at 8:37 am
This is a very disturbing story. It will have to gradually unfold; at this point there is insufficient information to know how pervasive the errors and/or corruption were and to what extent Harvard may have been culpable. One aspect, however, seems to be obvious, if only as the proverbial elephant in the room. Evolutionary psychology and similar fields are social sciences. They may claim to be data driven natural sciences subject to the same rules of evidence as physics and chemistry, but they are clearly not. At some point the completely legitimate field of evolutionary biology morphed into one making interesting speculative claims about the evolutionary nature of human behavior. Many other social science fields, including other branches of psychology, pedagogy, sociology, etc. have also been consumed by the trend to be science more than art. I believe the Hauser case may ultimately shed light on this trend. Falsification of data is extremely serious if that is indeed what happened. A cover-up by a university is outrageous. But it may turn out that the ability to determine if monkeys can recognize themselves in a mirror or solve algebraic equations is simply subjective. Emily
diogenes2 - August 13, 2010 at 10:24 am
By way of correction, monkeys can not recognize themselves in a mirror. However,chimpanzees and dolphins can. The data are pretty solid and the experiments have been replicated a number of times. Not sure what that ability has to do with this discussion, however.
rentedname - August 13, 2010 at 10:42 am
Dear #1 (Emily), Good post for the first two sentences. You should have stopped there. You didn’t have enough evidence from the story to support your generalizations.
11147066 - August 13, 2010 at 11:13 am
To respond to diogenes2, I stand corrected about chimpanzees. The relevance to the story is that part of Dr. Hauser’s research dealt with this self-recognition of chimpanzees.To respond to rentedname, there is indeed a great deal of evidence to support my claim that social sciences have increasingly defined themselves much more as data driven “hard sciences” than they did in the past, when, for example, traditional psychology was much more widely considered a humanistic and philosophical enterprise. I wrote a brief blog entry, not an article. You may disagree with my suggestion but there are many journal articles and books directed towards both academic and general audiences detailing this historical change. I agree that there is not yet enough evidence about the specifics of this case to know if there was clear-cut fraud, exaggeraton of the “objective” nature of Hauser’s conclusions, or both.Emily
12080243 - August 13, 2010 at 11:23 am
Harvard may be strong enough internally and properly to investigate faculty and administrative misconduct. Time will tell. Clearly, lesser institutions and their leaders are not confident or don’t have the intelligence and skills to investigate misconduct. They are apt to punish the messenger, not the miscreants. Read for yourself a president’s sworn testimony that punishes a messenger and protects miscreants at http://www.usmnews.net: “What does Martha D. Saunders, President of USM (University of Southern Mississippi) think?Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBAProfessorSchool of AccountancyCollege of BusinessUniversity of Southern Mississippim.depree@usm.edu
havesomehumility - August 13, 2010 at 12:49 pm
Emily, you make a horrible generalization in your statement, “Evolutionary psychology and similar fields are social sciences. They may claim to be data driven natural sciences subject to the same rules of evidence as physics and chemistry, but they are clearly not”. I suggest you overcome your ignorance and actually read academic papers in the field. To claim that social sciences aren’t data driven? Have you been living in a hole? You are insinuating that falsification of data only occurs in social sciences and that in itself is laughable. You weren’t talking about “historical change” in your first statement. You were claiming that social sciences in the present are trying to be more “science than art”.
11147066 - August 13, 2010 at 1:33 pm
No, I haven’t been living in a whole, to answer your rude rhetorical question. One can choose to view social sciences as more productively allied to natural sciences in their research methods or not. I am simply remarking that there has been significant change in the way these disciplines have defined themselves. This result may be both positive and negative depending on the context. One interesting way to observe these changes is to read issues of different social science journals over the last decades and you will clearly see a greater emphasis recently on data, reproducible results, and longitudinal studies than used to be the norm. My comments are not meant to make those in the social sciences defensive, as your response clearly is. There are many different ways to study and interpret human behavior. Sometimes subsequent research validates them and sometimes it calls them into question. I am merely suggesting that the Hauser case, of which we still know very little, may, in addition to issues of fraud and deliberate falsification, shed light on the very methods and philosphies that underpin some types of research in Hauser’s field.Emily
jhkfrs - August 13, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Before this set of commentaries deteriorate into yet another foolish inter-disciplinary spat, surely the important issue here is the reliability of published scholarship. Harvard University owes it to its students, scholars and the discipline to carry out a rigorous enquiry and then publish openly their findings. Until this is done speculation is damaging to everyone. Announcements implying the impending death of peer review are a little premature, whatever the outcome of this enquiry.Jack
3224243 - August 20, 2010 at 7:19 am
Although I have a degree in psychology and an MBA, I agree (to an extent) with #1. It’s amazing the extent to which social scientists (in my experience, psychologists and economists) use statistical analysis to “prove” to themselves and others that they’re closer to the “real” sciences than the social sciences.
ehyslopm - August 20, 2010 at 11:31 am
I prefer to term this debate an epistemological spat rather than a disciplinary one, but I suppose the latter is inevitable given the former. There are many significant problems with trying to apply the methods of natural science to the study and analysis of human behavior. Although I will not enumerate those differences in this forum, the entire interpretation of data in social “sciences” is beset with subjectivity. The language (what distinguishes theft from redistributive justice?) of description, culture, antecedent variables and study context intersect with to undermine both validity and reliability. I’ve never heard of this particular Harvard professor. I would be suprised if his alleged behavior was an isolated instance at Harvard or elsewhere in the quest to beef up a career. When truth is less important that the number or popularity of publications, academic integrity is the predictable victim. I’m not trying to justify such actions – just understand them.
qwerty4321 - August 26, 2010 at 9:24 am
I fully agree with Emily. And I am indeed quite interested to the whole subject. Emily, I would be very grateful if you could point me to your blog and to the books you mention.Many thanks,Dan
qwerty4321 - August 26, 2010 at 9:35 am
BTW, for those interested in the issues of the objectivty in the “soft” sciences and of the “publish or perish” problem, I invite you to check out these papers of mine that compare bias between disciplines, and between US states.Guess where we find more of it… (and before anyone says so, yes, what I do is soft science too, so we should wait for independent replication before deeiming it conclusive)Disciplineshttp://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010068Stateshttp://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010271Cheers,Dan