{"id":12861,"date":"2014-06-09T05:56:50","date_gmt":"2014-06-09T10:56:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=12861"},"modified":"2014-06-10T06:19:09","modified_gmt":"2014-06-10T11:19:09","slug":"icymi-globe-summarizes-harvard-report-on-hauser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=12861","title":{"rendered":"ICYMI: Globe summarizes Harvard report on Hauser"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those who have been following the Marc Hauser<\/a> case, on LLOG<\/a> or elsewhere, may have missed this: Carolyn Y. Johnson, \"Harvard report shines light on ex-researcher's misconduct<\/a>\", Boston Globe<\/em> 5\/30\/2014:<\/p>\n

When former Harvard pyschology professor Marc Hauser was found solely responsible in a series of six scientific misconduct cases in 2012, he distanced himself from the problems, portraying them as an unfortunate consequence of his heavy workload. He said he took responsibility, \u201cwhether or not I was directly involved.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But a copy of an internal Harvard report released to the Globe under the Freedom of Information Act now paints a vivid picture of what actually happened in the Hauser lab and suggests it was not mere negligence that led to the problems.<\/span><\/p>\n

The 85-page report details instances in which Hauser changed data so that it would show a desired effect. It shows that he more than once rebuffed or downplayed questions and concerns from people in his laboratory about how a result was obtained. The report also describes \u201ca disturbing pattern of misrepresentation of results and shading of truth\u201d and a \u201creckless disregard for basic scientific standards.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The story was picked up by Jennifer Cousin-Frankel in Science<\/em> magazine (\"Harvard Misconduct Investigation of Psychologist Released<\/a>\", 5\/30\/2014), and Andrew Gelman (\"Mmm, statistical significance . . . Evilicious!<\/a>\", 5\/30\/2014), but not otherwise widely noted.<\/p>\n

Hauser has continued\u00a0to get support from influential voices, including Nicholas Wade, who blurbed Hauser's latest book Evilicious<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n

What Steven Pinker has done for violence, Marc Hauser has achieved with evil \u2013 this book brings the light of science to illuminate the heart of darkness.<\/span><\/p>\n

There's an interesting exchange between Norbert Hornstein and Andrew Gelman\u00a0in the comments on\u00a0Andrew's post \"Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad<\/a>\", 6\/16\/2013. (The version below is excerpted to focus on the point of interest — see the whole thing at the cited link.)<\/p>\n

Hornstein:\u00a0Does A know the facts here? From what I could gather, Hauser was thrown out for supposedly cooking the books. Does A know that ALL of the disputed work has been replicated? Let me say that again: all of published work singled out for censure has been replicated. […]\u00a0Maybe A thinks that replication doesn\u2019t really matter, however. All that really matters is whether Hauser is \u201cdisgraced.\u201d Whether he deserves to be is another matter entirely. Right? Just asking.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Gelman:\u00a0See here<\/a> for some details. Lots of falsification going on, not just \u201che may have been sloppy, he might have been able to do it better.\u201d More like, he knowingly wrote untruths.<\/p>\n

Hornstein:\u00a0To repeat, all the disputed work replicated. There is nothing to retract. He was right. Not, he though he was, but from all we know right now, he was. For you this counts for nothing? Form over substance?<\/p>\n

Gelman:\u00a0You got it. I don\u2019t want to have someone around who writes things he knows are false, who falsifies data, who publishes a graph of made-up numbers that purport to be real. […]\u00a0To a statistician, the data are substance, not form. If you think that when a paper has fabricated data that \u201cthere is nothing to retract,\u201d I think that\u2019s just sad. I think honesty in reporting of data and measurement is central to science, and to scholarship more generally.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hornstein:\u00a0I resist being put into the nutty position of defending data fabrication. So, let\u2019s stipulate that making up data is bad. But, I do think that \u2018l\u2019affaire Hauser\u2019 has been vastly overblown. His alleged fakery did not disrupt the forward march I\u2019d science. He was substantially correct. How do I know? Because to this date nobody has shown that his reported results do not stand. Cr all the huffing and puffing, for all the purported cooking of the books he was right.\u00a0<\/span>And not just once but all three times (I.e. the published work). So though I too would like people to report their findings truthfully and though like everyone else I think that honesty is the best policy, if one is interested in advancing science, the sin of fakery has not been, in my view, the main impediment to good scientific work.<\/p>\n

Gelman:\u00a0You write, \u201clike everyone else I think that honesty is the best policy.\u201d No, that\u2019s not true. Not everyone thinks that honesty is the best policy. Marc Hauser did not think honesty was the best policy. He thought the best policy was to publish statements that he knew were false, to make up data and to falsely describe his data collection. Diederik Stapel did not think honesty was the best policy. Jonah Lehrer did not think honesty was the best policy. Dr. Anil Potti did not think honesty was the best policy. Etc etc etc. Lots and lots of people don\u2019t think honesty is the best policy. As a noted psychology researcher once wrote, \u201cwe evolved a taste for being bad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Norbert's position seems to be that Hauser's original publications were \"fake but accurate<\/a>\", in the memorably phrase used by\u00a0a NYT headline writer\u00a0to describe\u00a0a different sort of\u00a0situation\u00a0…<\/p>\n

My own view is that this case should be considered in the context of the whole\u00a0spectrum of less-than-honest scientific practices.\u00a0\u00a0At one end there's subjective coding, cherry picking, data dredging, \u00a0and model shopping; at the other end, there's outright fabrication. If strictures against all of these activities\u00a0were enforced by dismissal or forced resignation, university\u00a0science faculties would be sadly reduced.<\/p>\n

I'm not trying to make a \"slippery slope\" argument, though I suspect that many data-fabricators start out with more innocent forms of scientific dishonesty. It's fine to treat making up data as a crime of a different order from confirmation bias in data coding, or\u00a0the \"file drawer effect\"<\/a>\u00a0in deciding what to publish.\u00a0But as a result, subjective coding and publication bias are\u00a0probably bigger problems for science than fake data is.<\/p>\n

Some of these problems will be somewhat ameliorated by the trend, pushed by government policies in the U.S.<\/a> and the U.K.<\/a>, towards open data, as well as\u00a0the spread of techniques for automating coding that used to require subjective judgment. Linguistics research is especially open to this change.<\/p>\n

[The (redacted) pdf of the Harvard report is here<\/a>.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those who have been following the Marc Hauser case, on LLOG or elsewhere, may have missed this: Carolyn Y. Johnson, \"Harvard report shines light on ex-researcher's misconduct\", Boston Globe 5\/30\/2014: When former Harvard pyschology professor Marc Hauser was found solely responsible in a series of six scientific misconduct cases in 2012, he distanced himself from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12861"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12869,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12861\/revisions\/12869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}