It would have been harsh to title this post “Marc Hauser, RIP”. However, unless the following is shown to be in error, I’ll never believe anything he writes or has written:
According to the document that was provided to The Chronicle, the experiment in question was coded by Mr. Hauser and a research assistant in his laboratory. A second research assistant was asked by Mr. Hauser to analyze the results. When the second research assistant analyzed the first research assistant’s codes, he found that the monkeys didn’t seem to notice the change in pattern. In fact, they looked at the speaker more often when the pattern was the same. In other words, the experiment was a bust.
But Mr. Hauser’s coding showed something else entirely: He found that the monkeys did notice the change in pattern—and, according to his numbers, the results were statistically significant. If his coding was right, the experiment was a big success.
The second research assistant was bothered by the discrepancy. How could two researchers watching the same videotapes arrive at such different conclusions? He suggested to Mr. Hauser that a third researcher should code the results. In an e-mail message to Mr. Hauser, a copy of which was provided to The Chronicle, the research assistant who analyzed the numbers explained his concern. “I don’t feel comfortable analyzing results/publishing data with that kind of skew until we can verify that with a third coder,” he wrote.
A graduate student agreed with the research assistant and joined him in pressing Mr. Hauser to allow the results to be checked, the document given to The Chronicle indicates. But Mr. Hauser resisted, repeatedly arguing against having a third researcher code the videotapes and writing that they should simply go with the data as he had already coded it. After several back-and-forths, it became plain that the professor was annoyed.
“i am getting a bit pissed here,” Mr. Hauser wrote in an e-mail to one research assistant. “there were no inconsistencies! let me repeat what happened. i coded everything. then [a research assistant] coded all the trials highlighted in yellow. we only had one trial that didn’t agree. i then mistakenly told [another research assistant] to look at column B when he should have looked at column D. … we need to resolve this because i am not sure why we are going in circles.”
The research assistant who analyzed the data and the graduate student decided to review the tapes themselves, without Mr. Hauser’s permission, the document says. They each coded the results independently. Their findings concurred with the conclusion that the experiment had failed: The monkeys didn’t appear to react to the change in patterns.
They then reviewed Mr. Hauser’s coding and, according to the research assistant’s statement, discovered that what he had written down bore little relation to what they had actually observed on the videotapes. He would, for instance, mark that a monkey had turned its head when the monkey didn’t so much as flinch. It wasn’t simply a case of differing interpretations, they believed: His data were just completely wrong.
As word of the problem with the experiment spread, several other lab members revealed they had had similar run-ins with Mr. Hauser, the former research assistant says. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. There was, several researchers in the lab believed, a pattern in which Mr. Hauser reported false data and then insisted that it be used.
If taken literally, this description seems to imply that Hauser was making up data — writing down results much more favorable to his career than the actual results — and not realizing it! As if someone else was marking the data sheet. Since the videotapes are being coded by more than one person the fabrication/delusion/whatever would come to light, you might think, but he does it anyway! And then gets “a bit pissed” when things don’t work out perfectly.
I would love to hear Hauser’s side of this story, and see the videotapes being coded. So far Hauser has said nothing to make me doubt the straightforward interpretation: He made up data. After Saul Sternberg and I published a paper implying that Ranjit Chandra had made up data, Chandra retired.
Derek Bickerton says Hauser “fell victim to a soon-to-be-outdated view of evolution”. I am more interested in what this says about Harvard and Hauser’s co-authors. In particular, I wonder what Noam Chomsky, one of Hauser’s co-authors, will say. The incident makes Chomsky look bad. Hauser appears to be a person who pushes aside the truth of things. That Chomsky wrote a major paper with him suggests that Chomsky failed to notice this.
Thanks to Dave Lull and Language Log.
“Scientific dogma, not Hauser is to blame for misconduct”: geeze, we need to ignore Godwin here. “Anti-semitism, not Hitler, is to blame for Holocaust.”
Never blame a crook when you can hold an abstraction responsible.
“The incident makes Chomsky look bad. Hauser appears to be a person who pushes aside the truth of things. That Chomsky wrote a major paper with him suggests that Chomsky failed to notice this.”
It’s this kind of guilt-by-association that worries me the most, given that I have friends and colleagues who either passed through Hauser’s lab at some point or were associated with him loosely, as co-authors. Please recognize that a lot of the work with his name on it was conducted entirely out of his hands, and thus the integrity of that research rests on those authors. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to sort out which papers he had his fingers on the data collection/coding/analysis, and which he was a passive participant in or only helped in designing experiments and/or writing the results up.
Note that he was apparently exposed BY HIS STUDENTS, which to me says a lot for those who took those measures, since they placed themselves at risk both personally and professionally. You want to roll them up in the guilt-by-association mess, also?
Finally, wasn’t the Chomsky paper purely theory? So how would Chomsky “notice” Hauser’s tendency to distort or outright fake data? If it’s just an ideas paper, then I don’t see what it has to do with all of this. I’m not defending that paper, which I personally found opaque and muddled, I’m just saying I don’t see Chomsky as having any guilt-by-association whatsoever, and I think it is extremely unfair to characterize him that way.
I’m not defending Hauser one iota, he deserves to be fired in my frank opinion. For the sake of avoiding a witch-hunt that punishes the innocent, Harvard should be transparent on this matter, and also force Hauser and his colleagues to clarify their respective roles in the authorship of each paper to the extent possible, regardless of whether their authenticity has been formally called into question.
CF, it doesn’t matter because Chomsky wrote a “theory” paper with Hauser? I don’t follow this argument. Theories are supposed to be based on facts — on evidence. That evidence should be fairly described, not slanted (e.g., by omission, by overstatement) toward a favored point of view. Which is exactly what Hauser seems to have done — grossly slant stuff to help his career. If Chomsky writes theory papers unrelated to, unconcerned about, or unaffected by available evidence, that REALLY makes him look bad.
The students who exposed Hauser did not co-author papers based on faked data, we can be sure. They are cases of esteem-by-lack-of-association.
In this article, Michael Ruse, a philosopher further from Hauser than Chomsky is, is angry. “I feel a bit as though I have got egg all over my face,” he writes.
If Hauser walked around with a badge that said “FAKER” and his coauthors ignored this, you might have reason to blame them. But it wasn’t like that. Hauser is an outstanding experimentalist, a sharp thinker, astonishingly erudite, and on top of about six different fields. That stuff doesn’t become false just because it turns out he was also faking his data.
OK, say you’re Chomsky, and Hauser has a bunch of cool ideas that sync with what you’re doing and you sit down to write a paper together (and with Fitch). What now? you’re supposed to ask to see the lab notebooks and inspect his hard drives for the data from his already published papers before trusting him enough to write a paper together? Don’t be silly.
Or maybe you think if you’re any good at all you’re just supposed to see directly into Hauser’s soul and know you’re dealing with a criminal mastermind? And you’re just a loser if you don’t have those particular superpowers? I don’t think so. Is that what you really think?
Remember, Hauser and Chomsky didn’t do any experiments together. They thought some thoughts together, which is a very different thing.
You can’t seriously expect Chomsky to review this sort of data. He’s obviously a theory guy, and wouldn’t have the lab training anyway. Hauser claimed to have discovered that tamarins can grasp the rules of a regular grammar while failing to grasp analogous rules in a phrase-structure grammar. Since these concepts come straight from the Chomsky hierarchy, it is only natural that Chomsky would have been interested. Hauser claimed to have evidence that made it look like differences in monkey-vs.-human competence could be mapped onto part of the Chomsky hiearchy. Very cool, if true. But if tamarins can’t even pick up the rules of a regular grammar, then it just shows that Hauser failed to establish a connection. I don’t see how Chomsky’s syntax is discredited or his speculations on language evolution.
Uh, I dunno Seth, it’s not like Chomsky married and lived with a serial-killer for ten years without twigging, and you don’t know that this kind of seediness has blighted everything Hauser’s ever done. It seems like innuendo to try to tar him with this. Do you have something else against him?
I have always found his ideas about politics interesting; I think he is useful. I like that he stresses the relationship between thought and language, though I vaguely recall feeling unconvinced by his ideas about animals. Humans probably do have unique hard-wiring for language, but if apes can use sign-language, there’s no point in denying that that is language-aquisition – that strikes me as goalpost-shifting.
Seth, it’s pretty difficult to detect that someone is faking this sort of data unless you see the raw data — i.e., the tapes. How the heck is Chomsky (and similarly placed individuals) supposed to guess Hauser is up to no good on papers he has NOTHING to do with except as a reader, can’t replicate on his own, and that no one has publicly challenged the integrity of? Of course I’m sure Chomsky is disappointed and feels like he has “egg on his face” to some degree as well, but it’s hardly surprising that a human was successfully able to deceive other humans. I don’t think we should think less of the deceived unless they personally saw two sets of tape codings (or Hauser’s coding plus the tape), noticed the fact that they disagreed, and thought or said nothing. We have evolved with a lot of social machinery, and deception is one technology that often succeeds. Unless you’ve developed some foolproof B.S. detector you’d like to sell us? I’d love to have one of those…
CF, I agree. I didn’t mean my comment as a judgment, I was just predicting the future. I should have made that clear. I don’t think less of Chomsky because of this. It’s like predicting that X will win the election even though you didn’t vote for him.
The first case of crookedness that I was told about involved a distinguished researcher who invented some data to supplement real measurements. His postdoc co-author later realised what had happened and opined, in private, that the invented data were probably pretty good – the so-and-so had had a fine intuition for the problem in question. Later in his career the wrongdoer was eased out from his post in an ancient university, the charge sheet including bullying, blackmail and theft, in addition to mere academic crimes like plagiarism. Experience teaches that once someone decides that he’s too grand for the rules to apply to him, and once he gets off with it, problems get worse.
Reminds me of the story of Samuel Waksal, former CEO of ImClone and friend of Martha Stewart. (He spent seven years in federal prison for insider trading and related crimes.) Before he became a businessman, he spent time in academia, doing biology research. He resigned from (or was forced out of) four different institutions — all under highly suspicious circumstances.
https://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB1033076483640238993.html
“The incident makes Chomsky look bad” — especially because Chomsky has been Hauser’s mentor for more than 15 years:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/9/14/hauser-lab-research-professor/