Marc Hauser
Encyclopedia
Marc D. Hauser is an American evolutionary biologist and a researcher in primate
behavior and animal cognition
who taught in the Psychology Department at Harvard University
. In August 2010, a committee of Harvard faculty found Hauser solely responsible for eight counts of unspecified scientific misconduct
. On August 2, 2011 Hauser resigned his position at Harvard.
and a PhD from UCLA
. Hauser was a Harvard College
Professor, and Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, and Biological Anthropology. He was the co-director of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program at Harvard, Director of the Cognitive Evolution Lab, and adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Program in Neurosciences.
Hauser's research sits at the interface between evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience
and is aimed at understanding the processes and consequences of cognitive evolution. Observations and experiments focus on nonhuman animals and humans of different ages and mental competence, incorporating methodological procedures and theoretical insights from ethology, infant cognitive development, evolutionary theory, cognitive neuroscience and neurobiology. Current foci include: studies of language evolution, the nature of moral judgments, the development and evolution of mathematical representations, comparative studies of economic-like choice, the precursors to musical competence, and the nature of event perception. One of his research projects is internet based 'The Moral Sense Test' in which the participant is presented with a series of hypothetical moral dilemmas and is asked to offer a judgment regarding each one.
Hauser received a National Science Foundation
Young Investigator Award, a science medal from the Collège de France
, and a Guggenheim Fellowship
. He has published approximately 200 articles in major research journals as well as six books. His work has garnered attention from the mainstream press, including coverage in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post. He has made frequent appearances on various NPR
shows, as well as television and international radio.
. The details of this investigation were not publicly released, and the lack of transparency evoked substantial speculation. Writing in the New York Times, Nicholas Wade
summarized:
In July 2011, after the Psychology Department faculty voted to bar Hauser from teaching in the upcoming academic year, Hauser resigned his faculty position at Harvard effective August 1, 2011. In his resignation, Hauser stated that he had "some exciting opportunities in the private sector" involving education for high-risk teenagers, but that he might go back to academia "in the years to come."
Office of Inspector General, and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. They will conduct their own review and make their conclusions available to the public.
A 2002 paper published in the journal Cognition was retracted. In this paper, Hauser and his collaborators concluded that cotton-top tamarin monkeys
could learn simple rule-like patterns. In two additional published papers, some field notes or video recordings were "incomplete", although Hauser and his co-author replicated the experiments. The Proceedings of the Royal Society
published the replication of the missing data in an addendum to one of the papers. In April 2011 Hauser and Justin Wood (coauthor of the original paper) replicated the results of the 2007 Science study and published them in the journal.
Unnamed scientists in the field have claimed that Harvard decided to investigate Hauser's lab after students who had worked there made allegations of data falsification.
Michael Tomasello
, another well-known animal cognition researcher, claimed that some of Hauser's previous students personally told him that there "was a pattern and they had specific evidence ”. Tomasello also stated, prior to the official announcement, that he had information from "a Harvard faculty member and from former students of Dr. Hauser" that the investigation found evidence for eight counts of scientific misconduct; this statement was later confirmed by Harvard's dean (see previous section).
On August 19, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
reported the contents of allegations made by a former research assistant of Hauser's. The former research assistant stated that Hauser falsely coded videotapes of monkey behavior, resisted his research assistants and students' requests to have them recoded by another observer and then pressured his students to accept his data analysis. When they went ahead and recoded the data without Hauser's permission, they allegedly found that Hauser's coding bore little relation to what was on the tapes. According to the document, several other lab members had similar run-ins with Hauser.
told USA Today
: "But it leaves open whether we in the field of animal behavior should just worry about those three articles or about many more...... From my reading of the dean's letter, it seems that all data produced by this lab over the years are potentially in question."
As several authors have written, however, Hauser has published over 240 papers with dozens of internationally respected colleagues as well as students. As the Cambridge University linguists Bert Vaux and Jeffrey Watumull noted in the Harvard Crimson, and repeated in Wade's New York Times article, " Dr. Hauser [has an] “unimpeachable scientific integrity” and [has been] charged [by] critics who were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program.” It should be noted, however, that Vaux and Watumull were working with Hauser after the investigation had begun and thus were not disinterested parties.
Gerry Altmann, the editor of Cognition, subsequently posted his personal conclusion that Hauser fabricated data as part of a deception, after being given a summary of the relevant portions of Harvard's inquiry. Altmann noted that the conclusion of fabrication was his own conjecture, and not that of the Harvard investigation, which offered no explanation for discrepancies between the video record and the published paper. However, if true, Altmann said, "“This is, to my mind, the worst form of academic conduct.’’ According to the New York Times, Hauser was supposed to alternate the experimental condition with a control condition, and thus both should be on the videotape. However, the videotape only showed the experimental conditions, not the control. Altmann said that it therefore seemed that the control experiments were not performed and that “given the published design of the experiment, my conclusion is that the control condition was fabricated.” Altmann told Science that there may yet be an alternative explanation for this discrepancy. But he can’t imagine what it might be, and added "I know that the investigation was rigorous to the extreme."
Nicholas Wade, writing in the New York Times on October 25, 2010, claimed that Altmann changed his position: "Also last month his principal accuser outside of Harvard, Gerry Altmann, allowed that he may have spoken too hastily. But he now says an innocent explanation, based on laboratory error, not fraud, is possible. People should step back, he writes, and “allow due process to conclude.” However, Altmann subsequently wrote in his blog that Wade selectively quoted him and misrepresented his position http://gerryaltmann.blogspot.com/search?q=hauser. In fact, Altmann has not changed his position and continues to believe that Hauser is guilty of data fabrication. Altmann wrote: "In fact, there has been no stepping back. As I make very clear in this blog (and repeated in emails to Mr. Wade - see below), the information I have received, when taken at face value, leads me to maintain my belief that the data that had been published in the journal Cognition was effectively a fiction - that is, there was no basis in the recorded data for those data. I concluded, and I continue to conclude, that the data were most likely fabricated (that is, after all, what a fiction is - a fabrication). It is true that I did write here that there existed an alternative explanation for what happened, based on a sequence of errors. However, for that interpretation to be correct (i.e. that the data reported in Cognition were due to an unfortunate sequence of errors), the information I had been given, by Harvard’s Dean, would have to have been incorrect."http://gerryaltmann.blogspot.com/search?q=hauser This disagreement between Altmann and the reporter over what Altmann said seems curious but one should note that the reporter, Nicolas Wade, is not a disinterested party. His books, such as The Faith Instinct, heavily cite Hauser's work and thus Wade presumably has a stake in Hauser being innocent.
According to an article on the Science magazine website, the investigation of Hauser by the U.S. Attorney's Office is "somewhat unusual" and "historically they've done so in cases in which the misconduct was particularly egregious and significant amounts of money were involved." The article also notes that we still don't know exactly what Hauser did "and if did anything bad enough to merit jail time".
Though Hauser took a year-long leave of absence from Harvard, he was at first still being allowed to teach at the Harvard Extension School, which generated further controversy. Gerry Altmann, editor of Cognition, told the Harvard Crimson, "“One view of teaching is that you are an ambassador for the science you are teaching and for the institution at which you are teaching. I personally do not believe that someone who is found guilty of misconduct is ambassador material.” On the other hand, Michael S. Landy, a psychology professor at New York University said, “Without knowing the exact specifics of the case, what I would say is if you want to chase someone out of the field forever, that doesn’t seem like the right idea,” "That’s just hurting that person and the field. Seems to me that there has to be a middle ground." In the meantime, however, speculation rose that Hauser fabricated control data for the paper he retracted from Cognition. Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, told The New York Times that the failure to have performed a reported control experiment would be “a very serious and perhaps unforgivable offense.” The New York Times also stated that fabrication of data is usually followed by expulsion from the scientific community. On September 1, 2010, it was announced that Hauser's classes at the Extension School were canceled. On April 21, 2011, the Boston Globe reported that the Harvard Psychology faculty voted to bar Hauser from teaching in the 2011-2012 academic year. Michael D. Smith, dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, agreed and extended it to other Arts and Sciences departments.
Gordon G. Gallup
questioned Hauser's findings, and reviewed some video recordings of Hauser's experiment, saying that “when I played the videotapes [for Hauser's experiments], there was not a thread of compelling evidence — scientific or otherwise — that any of the tamarins had learned to correctly decipher mirrored information about themselves.’’ Upon requesting the remaining videotapes, Gallup was informed that the other tapes had been stolen. Together with Anderson, Gallup published a critical response to Hauser's article. Their criticism of Hauser's paper stated that the coding criteria were described in insufficient detail to code the monkeys' behavior and that, according to their assessment, the cotton-top tamarins did not show the behavior that they considered as evidence for mirror recognition in chimpanzees or other great apes.
Hauser and a co-author published a reply to these criticisms, clarifying their coding criteria and responding to the other criticisms. However, Hauser reported that his subsequent attempts to replicate the experiments were unsuccessful, observing no evidence for the previously claimed result.
Primate
A primate is a mammal of the order Primates , which contains prosimians and simians. Primates arose from ancestors that lived in the trees of tropical forests; many primate characteristics represent adaptations to life in this challenging three-dimensional environment...
behavior and animal cognition
Animal cognition
Animal cognition is the title given to the study of the mental capacities of non-human animals. It has developed out of comparative psychology, but has also been strongly influenced by the approach of ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology...
who taught in the Psychology Department at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. In August 2010, a committee of Harvard faculty found Hauser solely responsible for eight counts of unspecified scientific misconduct
Scientific misconduct
Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in professional scientific research. A Lancet review on Handling of Scientific Misconduct in Scandinavian countries provides the following sample definitions: *Danish definition: "Intention or...
. On August 2, 2011 Hauser resigned his position at Harvard.
Biography
Hauser received a BS from Bucknell UniversityBucknell University
Bucknell University is a private liberal arts university located alongside the West Branch Susquehanna River in the rolling countryside of Central Pennsylvania in the town of Lewisburg, 30 miles southeast of Williamsport and 60 miles north of Harrisburg. The university consists of the College of...
and a PhD from UCLA
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...
. Hauser was a Harvard College
Harvard College
Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...
Professor, and Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, and Biological Anthropology. He was the co-director of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program at Harvard, Director of the Cognitive Evolution Lab, and adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Program in Neurosciences.
Hauser's research sits at the interface between evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain...
and is aimed at understanding the processes and consequences of cognitive evolution. Observations and experiments focus on nonhuman animals and humans of different ages and mental competence, incorporating methodological procedures and theoretical insights from ethology, infant cognitive development, evolutionary theory, cognitive neuroscience and neurobiology. Current foci include: studies of language evolution, the nature of moral judgments, the development and evolution of mathematical representations, comparative studies of economic-like choice, the precursors to musical competence, and the nature of event perception. One of his research projects is internet based 'The Moral Sense Test' in which the participant is presented with a series of hypothetical moral dilemmas and is asked to offer a judgment regarding each one.
Hauser received a National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
Young Investigator Award, a science medal from the Collège de France
Collège de France
The Collège de France is a higher education and research establishment located in Paris, France, in the 5th arrondissement, or Latin Quarter, across the street from the historical campus of La Sorbonne at the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue des Écoles...
, and a Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
. He has published approximately 200 articles in major research journals as well as six books. His work has garnered attention from the mainstream press, including coverage in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post. He has made frequent appearances on various NPR
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
shows, as well as television and international radio.
Scientific misconduct
In August 2010 it was announced that Hauser had decided to take a year's leave of absence from Harvard, after a 3-year internal investigation found him solely responsible for eight counts of scientific misconductScientific misconduct
Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in professional scientific research. A Lancet review on Handling of Scientific Misconduct in Scandinavian countries provides the following sample definitions: *Danish definition: "Intention or...
. The details of this investigation were not publicly released, and the lack of transparency evoked substantial speculation. Writing in the New York Times, Nicholas Wade
Nicholas Wade
Nicholas Wade is a British-born scientific reporter, editor and author who currently writes for the Science Times section of The New York Times.-Biography:Wade was born in Aylesbury, England and educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge...
summarized:
There is a wide spectrum of scientific sins, ranging from wrist-slap offenses like bad data storage at one end, to data fabrication at the other. It is still not clear where on this spectrum Dr. Hauser’s errors may fall. He has admitted only to unspecified "mistakes," not to misconduct.
In July 2011, after the Psychology Department faculty voted to bar Hauser from teaching in the upcoming academic year, Hauser resigned his faculty position at Harvard effective August 1, 2011. In his resignation, Hauser stated that he had "some exciting opportunities in the private sector" involving education for high-risk teenagers, but that he might go back to academia "in the years to come."
Officially released information
On August 20, 2010, the dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences released a statement confirming that an internal investigation had found Hauser guilty of eight counts of scientific misconduct. Three counts involved published papers, and five involved unpublished studies. The statement said that Harvard is cooperating with further investigations by the US Office of Research Integrity, the National Science FoundationNational Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
Office of Inspector General, and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. They will conduct their own review and make their conclusions available to the public.
A 2002 paper published in the journal Cognition was retracted. In this paper, Hauser and his collaborators concluded that cotton-top tamarin monkeys
Cottontop Tamarin
The cotton-top tamarin , also known as the Pinché tamarin, is a small New World monkey weighing less than 1 lb...
could learn simple rule-like patterns. In two additional published papers, some field notes or video recordings were "incomplete", although Hauser and his co-author replicated the experiments. The Proceedings of the Royal Society
Proceedings of the Royal Society
Proceedings of the Royal Society is the parent title of two scientific journals published by the Royal Society, whereas its initial journal, Philosophical Transactions, is now devoted to special thematic issues...
published the replication of the missing data in an addendum to one of the papers. In April 2011 Hauser and Justin Wood (coauthor of the original paper) replicated the results of the 2007 Science study and published them in the journal.
Additional allegations
In addition to the official findings cited above, various publications have relayed more specific accusations.Unnamed scientists in the field have claimed that Harvard decided to investigate Hauser's lab after students who had worked there made allegations of data falsification.
Michael Tomasello
Michael Tomasello
Michael Tomasello is an American developmentalpsychologist. He is a co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.-Life:...
, another well-known animal cognition researcher, claimed that some of Hauser's previous students personally told him that there "was a pattern and they had specific evidence ”. Tomasello also stated, prior to the official announcement, that he had information from "a Harvard faculty member and from former students of Dr. Hauser" that the investigation found evidence for eight counts of scientific misconduct; this statement was later confirmed by Harvard's dean (see previous section).
On August 19, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is a newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty, staff members and administrators....
reported the contents of allegations made by a former research assistant of Hauser's. The former research assistant stated that Hauser falsely coded videotapes of monkey behavior, resisted his research assistants and students' requests to have them recoded by another observer and then pressured his students to accept his data analysis. When they went ahead and recoded the data without Hauser's permission, they allegedly found that Hauser's coding bore little relation to what was on the tapes. According to the document, several other lab members had similar run-ins with Hauser.
Other commentary
While Harvard has confirmed that misconduct was committed by Hauser, scientists have continued to criticize Harvard over a lack of transparency in the investigation. As Frans de WaalFrans de Waal
Fransiscus Bernardus Maria de Waal, PhD , is a Dutch primatologist and ethologist. He is the Charles Howard Candler professor of Primate Behavior in the Emory University psychology department in Atlanta, Georgia, and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research...
told USA Today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
: "But it leaves open whether we in the field of animal behavior should just worry about those three articles or about many more...... From my reading of the dean's letter, it seems that all data produced by this lab over the years are potentially in question."
As several authors have written, however, Hauser has published over 240 papers with dozens of internationally respected colleagues as well as students. As the Cambridge University linguists Bert Vaux and Jeffrey Watumull noted in the Harvard Crimson, and repeated in Wade's New York Times article, " Dr. Hauser [has an] “unimpeachable scientific integrity” and [has been] charged [by] critics who were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program.” It should be noted, however, that Vaux and Watumull were working with Hauser after the investigation had begun and thus were not disinterested parties.
Gerry Altmann, the editor of Cognition, subsequently posted his personal conclusion that Hauser fabricated data as part of a deception, after being given a summary of the relevant portions of Harvard's inquiry. Altmann noted that the conclusion of fabrication was his own conjecture, and not that of the Harvard investigation, which offered no explanation for discrepancies between the video record and the published paper. However, if true, Altmann said, "“This is, to my mind, the worst form of academic conduct.’’ According to the New York Times, Hauser was supposed to alternate the experimental condition with a control condition, and thus both should be on the videotape. However, the videotape only showed the experimental conditions, not the control. Altmann said that it therefore seemed that the control experiments were not performed and that “given the published design of the experiment, my conclusion is that the control condition was fabricated.” Altmann told Science that there may yet be an alternative explanation for this discrepancy. But he can’t imagine what it might be, and added "I know that the investigation was rigorous to the extreme."
Nicholas Wade, writing in the New York Times on October 25, 2010, claimed that Altmann changed his position: "Also last month his principal accuser outside of Harvard, Gerry Altmann, allowed that he may have spoken too hastily. But he now says an innocent explanation, based on laboratory error, not fraud, is possible. People should step back, he writes, and “allow due process to conclude.” However, Altmann subsequently wrote in his blog that Wade selectively quoted him and misrepresented his position http://gerryaltmann.blogspot.com/search?q=hauser. In fact, Altmann has not changed his position and continues to believe that Hauser is guilty of data fabrication. Altmann wrote: "In fact, there has been no stepping back. As I make very clear in this blog (and repeated in emails to Mr. Wade - see below), the information I have received, when taken at face value, leads me to maintain my belief that the data that had been published in the journal Cognition was effectively a fiction - that is, there was no basis in the recorded data for those data. I concluded, and I continue to conclude, that the data were most likely fabricated (that is, after all, what a fiction is - a fabrication). It is true that I did write here that there existed an alternative explanation for what happened, based on a sequence of errors. However, for that interpretation to be correct (i.e. that the data reported in Cognition were due to an unfortunate sequence of errors), the information I had been given, by Harvard’s Dean, would have to have been incorrect."http://gerryaltmann.blogspot.com/search?q=hauser This disagreement between Altmann and the reporter over what Altmann said seems curious but one should note that the reporter, Nicolas Wade, is not a disinterested party. His books, such as The Faith Instinct, heavily cite Hauser's work and thus Wade presumably has a stake in Hauser being innocent.
According to an article on the Science magazine website, the investigation of Hauser by the U.S. Attorney's Office is "somewhat unusual" and "historically they've done so in cases in which the misconduct was particularly egregious and significant amounts of money were involved." The article also notes that we still don't know exactly what Hauser did "and if did anything bad enough to merit jail time".
Though Hauser took a year-long leave of absence from Harvard, he was at first still being allowed to teach at the Harvard Extension School, which generated further controversy. Gerry Altmann, editor of Cognition, told the Harvard Crimson, "“One view of teaching is that you are an ambassador for the science you are teaching and for the institution at which you are teaching. I personally do not believe that someone who is found guilty of misconduct is ambassador material.” On the other hand, Michael S. Landy, a psychology professor at New York University said, “Without knowing the exact specifics of the case, what I would say is if you want to chase someone out of the field forever, that doesn’t seem like the right idea,” "That’s just hurting that person and the field. Seems to me that there has to be a middle ground." In the meantime, however, speculation rose that Hauser fabricated control data for the paper he retracted from Cognition. Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, told The New York Times that the failure to have performed a reported control experiment would be “a very serious and perhaps unforgivable offense.” The New York Times also stated that fabrication of data is usually followed by expulsion from the scientific community. On September 1, 2010, it was announced that Hauser's classes at the Extension School were canceled. On April 21, 2011, the Boston Globe reported that the Harvard Psychology faculty voted to bar Hauser from teaching in the 2011-2012 academic year. Michael D. Smith, dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, agreed and extended it to other Arts and Sciences departments.
Previous controversy over an experiment
In 1995, Hauser reported that cotton-top tamarins can recognize themselves in a mirror. The Boston Globe claimed that a controversy over this paper was relevant to the misconduct investigations.Gordon G. Gallup
Gordon G. Gallup
Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. is a psychologist of the University at Albany's Psychology department, researching biopsychology. He received his Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1968, after which he joined the faculty of the Psychology Department at Tulane University...
questioned Hauser's findings, and reviewed some video recordings of Hauser's experiment, saying that “when I played the videotapes [for Hauser's experiments], there was not a thread of compelling evidence — scientific or otherwise — that any of the tamarins had learned to correctly decipher mirrored information about themselves.’’ Upon requesting the remaining videotapes, Gallup was informed that the other tapes had been stolen. Together with Anderson, Gallup published a critical response to Hauser's article. Their criticism of Hauser's paper stated that the coding criteria were described in insufficient detail to code the monkeys' behavior and that, according to their assessment, the cotton-top tamarins did not show the behavior that they considered as evidence for mirror recognition in chimpanzees or other great apes.
Hauser and a co-author published a reply to these criticisms, clarifying their coding criteria and responding to the other criticisms. However, Hauser reported that his subsequent attempts to replicate the experiments were unsuccessful, observing no evidence for the previously claimed result.