What Did Marc Hauser Do?

Marc Hauser, the cognitive psychologist who's been under scrutiny over a case of scientific misconduct since August last year (see past posts), has resigned from Harvard University.


He'd already been suspended from teaching, but until this announcement, it looked as though he might be able to hang on and resume his research, which focussed on the evolution of language and morality. Not any more. Hauser says he's quitting the field that made him famous:

“While on leave over the past year, I have begun doing some extremely interesting and rewarding work focusing on the educational needs of at-risk teenagers. I have also been offered some exciting opportunities in the private sector,” Hauser wrote in a resignation letter to the dean, dated July 7. “While I may return to teaching and research in the years to come, I look forward to focusing my energies in the coming year on these new and interesting challenges.”

So that's the end of the Hauser controversy, then?

Not really. The problem is, we still don't know what actually happened. It's hard for anyone to draw a line under this and move on, as Hauser seems to be doing.

Harvard have been reluctant to reveal any more than the barest details of the case. When the allegations first appeared, they set up an internal investigation. In August 2010 this concluded that Hauser was "soley responsible" for 8 cases of scientific misconduct.

But no-one - outside Harvard's investigative committee - knows what they were. He's been found guilty, and he's been punished, but no-one knows the crimes or the evidence against him.

Am I alone in finding this situation unsatisfactory?

Marc Hauser has published hundreds of scientific papers as well as various books. Only a small number of papers were implicated in the misconduct allegations. But to scientifically evaluate the rest of Hauser's work, we need to know what happened - and how easy the misconduct was to detect.

It makes a big difference, for example, whether the misconduct was the kind of thing that could have been going on, leaving no trace, for many years prior to this.

The lack of firm facts has led to discussion of the case being dominated by rumours and speculation. In October last year, for example, a newspaper published an article claiming that the case against Hauser might not be as strong as it first seemed.

This led to a rebuttal by Gerry Altman, then Editor of Cognition, a journal from which Hauser retracted a paper. Altman said that based on the information he had, Hauser was indeed guilty. But he admitted that he was going on what the Harvard investigation told him; he had not had access to the full data.

When Harvard found Hauser guilty, the Dean of his Faculty justified their secrecy:

The work of the investigating committee as well as its final report are considered confidential to protect both the individuals who made the allegations and those who assisted in the investigation.

Our investigative process will not succeed if individuals do not have complete confidence that their identities can be protected throughout the process and after the findings are reported to the appropriate agencies.

Furthermore, when the allegations concern research involving federal funding, funding agency regulations govern our processes ... For example, federal regulations impose an ongoing obligation to protect the identities of those who provided assistance to the investigation.

However, while this is certainly important, I don't see why it would prevent Harvard from releasing the conclusions of the report. They don't need to name the people who gave evidence against Hauser - but they do need to spell out what he did, and what they think he didn't do, so that the scientific community can come to their own conclusions as to the validity of the rest of Hauser's work.

In his letter, the Dean closed by saying that Harvard were going to

form a faculty committee this fall to reaffirm or recommend changes to the communication and confidentiality practices associated with the conclusion of cases involving allegations of professional misconduct.

I hope so.

What Did Marc Hauser Do?

Marc Hauser, the cognitive psychologist who's been under scrutiny over a case of scientific misconduct since August last year (see past posts), has resigned from Harvard University.


He'd already been suspended from teaching, but until this announcement, it looked as though he might be able to hang on and resume his research, which focussed on the evolution of language and morality. Not any more. Hauser says he's quitting the field that made him famous:

“While on leave over the past year, I have begun doing some extremely interesting and rewarding work focusing on the educational needs of at-risk teenagers. I have also been offered some exciting opportunities in the private sector,” Hauser wrote in a resignation letter to the dean, dated July 7. “While I may return to teaching and research in the years to come, I look forward to focusing my energies in the coming year on these new and interesting challenges.”

So that's the end of the Hauser controversy, then?

Not really. The problem is, we still don't know what actually happened. It's hard for anyone to draw a line under this and move on, as Hauser seems to be doing.

Harvard have been reluctant to reveal any more than the barest details of the case. When the allegations first appeared, they set up an internal investigation. In August 2010 this concluded that Hauser was "soley responsible" for 8 cases of scientific misconduct.

But no-one - outside Harvard's investigative committee - knows what they were. He's been found guilty, and he's been punished, but no-one knows the crimes or the evidence against him.

Am I alone in finding this situation unsatisfactory?

Marc Hauser has published hundreds of scientific papers as well as various books. Only a small number of papers were implicated in the misconduct allegations. But to scientifically evaluate the rest of Hauser's work, we need to know what happened - and how easy the misconduct was to detect.

It makes a big difference, for example, whether the misconduct was the kind of thing that could have been going on, leaving no trace, for many years prior to this.

The lack of firm facts has led to discussion of the case being dominated by rumours and speculation. In October last year, for example, a newspaper published an article claiming that the case against Hauser might not be as strong as it first seemed.

This led to a rebuttal by Gerry Altman, then Editor of Cognition, a journal from which Hauser retracted a paper. Altman said that based on the information he had, Hauser was indeed guilty. But he admitted that he was going on what the Harvard investigation told him; he had not had access to the full data.

When Harvard found Hauser guilty, the Dean of his Faculty justified their secrecy:

The work of the investigating committee as well as its final report are considered confidential to protect both the individuals who made the allegations and those who assisted in the investigation.

Our investigative process will not succeed if individuals do not have complete confidence that their identities can be protected throughout the process and after the findings are reported to the appropriate agencies.

Furthermore, when the allegations concern research involving federal funding, funding agency regulations govern our processes ... For example, federal regulations impose an ongoing obligation to protect the identities of those who provided assistance to the investigation.

However, while this is certainly important, I don't see why it would prevent Harvard from releasing the conclusions of the report. They don't need to name the people who gave evidence against Hauser - but they do need to spell out what he did, and what they think he didn't do, so that the scientific community can come to their own conclusions as to the validity of the rest of Hauser's work.

In his letter, the Dean closed by saying that Harvard were going to

form a faculty committee this fall to reaffirm or recommend changes to the communication and confidentiality practices associated with the conclusion of cases involving allegations of professional misconduct.

I hope so.

Marc Hauser: Plot Thickens, Solidifies, Cracks?

By now everyone's heard of the story of Marc Hauser, a well-known Harvard psychologist who's been suspended for research misconduct involving monkeys.

Until a few days ago, the situation seemed fairly clear: Hauser was guilty of several counts of misconduct, according to a Harvard committee, and there was no reason to doubt that judgement. Although the details of the investigation were never made public, it was generally believed that he'd fabricated the data from at least one experiment, as I explained previously.

However, all that was thrown into question on Monday by an article in the New York Times: Difficulties in Defining Errors in Case Against Harvard Researcher. The author, respected science journalist Nicholas Wade, writes that there's more to the story than first appeared, and specifically, that Hauser may not have fabricated data, instead being the victim of an innocent (if serious) mistake:

[A paper Hauser recently retracted], published in 2002, reported that rhesus monkeys can distinguish a novel string of sounds from a control sequence, an issue which has important bearing on their capacity for language. The novel and control sound sequences must be alternated... But the video of the experiment contains only novel sequences.

Critics like Dr. Altmann at first charged that the controls had never been done, and that since control conditions are reported in the paper, they must have been concocted. But Altmann... now says his earlier accusation was “heavily dependent on the knowledge that Harvard found Professor Hauser guilty of misconduct.” When he gave the issue further thought, he saw an alternative explanation.

In the experimental setup, the monkey is in a soundproof box. The researchers can see the computer is playing a sound but cannot hear it. What could have happened is that the computer, through a programming error, substituted a second test sound for the control sounds, and the researchers, unaware of the problem, wrote up their report assuming the control sounds had been played...

Even so, it is far from clear how the data on the video led to the reported results. This would be a devastating error, but not fraud. “It is conceivable that the data were not fabricated, but rather that the experiment was set up wrong, and that nobody realized this until after it was published,” Dr. Altmann wrote.

Wade also quoted two former students of Hauser's who praised his "unimpeachable scientific integrity” and who said his critics were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program”, and quotes an anonymous Harvard academic as saying the investigation was "lawyer-driven", unnecessarily long, and unfair to Hauser.

But yesterday Gerry Altmann, the Editor of the journal Cognition which published the retracted paper, hit back against Wade in a blog post, saying that Wade "selectively quoted" him to give the impression that he'd backtracked from his earlier conclusion that Hauser falsified the data.

...there has been no stepping back. As I make very clear... 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...

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 ... the information I had been given, by Harvard’s Dean, would have to have been incorrect.

Essentially, Altmann says that while in theory Hauser could have made an innocent mistake, Harvard's investigation specifically ruled out this and concluded that no innocent explanation was possible.

So at the end of the day, it comes down to this: Do I believe what the Dean [of Harvard] told me were the results of a long, careful, and painstaking investigation, or do I simply make up a “Just So Story” instead?...

This entire saga is about the misrepresentation of truth. It is ironic that the journalists who profess to expose truth place such little value in it.

What are we to make of all this? The issue is extremely important - the "fabrication" of data in the Cognition paper was the most serious allegation against Hauser, and (to my knowledge) the only thing which proved that his misconduct was deliberate as opposed to sloppy.

The crucial question therefore is whether the Harvard investigation was right to rule out an innocent explanation of the Cognition data. Altmann correctly says that either Harvard are wrong, or Hauser falsified data.

But the problem is that the details of Harvard's judgement remain private. So we (including Altmann) seem to be left with a question of whether to trust Harvard University and their internal investigation.

Marc Hauser: Plot Thickens, Solidifies, Cracks?

By now everyone's heard of the story of Marc Hauser, a well-known Harvard psychologist who's been suspended for research misconduct involving monkeys.

Until a few days ago, the situation seemed fairly clear: Hauser was guilty of several counts of misconduct, according to a Harvard committee, and there was no reason to doubt that judgement. Although the details of the investigation were never made public, it was generally believed that he'd fabricated the data from at least one experiment, as I explained previously.

However, all that was thrown into question on Monday by an article in the New York Times: Difficulties in Defining Errors in Case Against Harvard Researcher. The author, respected science journalist Nicholas Wade, writes that there's more to the story than first appeared, and specifically, that Hauser may not have fabricated data, instead being the victim of an innocent (if serious) mistake:

[A paper Hauser recently retracted], published in 2002, reported that rhesus monkeys can distinguish a novel string of sounds from a control sequence, an issue which has important bearing on their capacity for language. The novel and control sound sequences must be alternated... But the video of the experiment contains only novel sequences.

Critics like Dr. Altmann at first charged that the controls had never been done, and that since control conditions are reported in the paper, they must have been concocted. But Altmann... now says his earlier accusation was “heavily dependent on the knowledge that Harvard found Professor Hauser guilty of misconduct.” When he gave the issue further thought, he saw an alternative explanation.

In the experimental setup, the monkey is in a soundproof box. The researchers can see the computer is playing a sound but cannot hear it. What could have happened is that the computer, through a programming error, substituted a second test sound for the control sounds, and the researchers, unaware of the problem, wrote up their report assuming the control sounds had been played...

Even so, it is far from clear how the data on the video led to the reported results. This would be a devastating error, but not fraud. “It is conceivable that the data were not fabricated, but rather that the experiment was set up wrong, and that nobody realized this until after it was published,” Dr. Altmann wrote.

Wade also quoted two former students of Hauser's who praised his "unimpeachable scientific integrity” and who said his critics were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program”, and quotes an anonymous Harvard academic as saying the investigation was "lawyer-driven", unnecessarily long, and unfair to Hauser.

But yesterday Gerry Altmann, the Editor of the journal Cognition which published the retracted paper, hit back against Wade in a blog post, saying that Wade "selectively quoted" him to give the impression that he'd backtracked from his earlier conclusion that Hauser falsified the data.

...there has been no stepping back. As I make very clear... 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...

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 ... the information I had been given, by Harvard’s Dean, would have to have been incorrect.

Essentially, Altmann says that while in theory Hauser could have made an innocent mistake, Harvard's investigation specifically ruled out this and concluded that no innocent explanation was possible.

So at the end of the day, it comes down to this: Do I believe what the Dean [of Harvard] told me were the results of a long, careful, and painstaking investigation, or do I simply make up a “Just So Story” instead?...

This entire saga is about the misrepresentation of truth. It is ironic that the journalists who profess to expose truth place such little value in it.

What are we to make of all this? The issue is extremely important - the "fabrication" of data in the Cognition paper was the most serious allegation against Hauser, and (to my knowledge) the only thing which proved that his misconduct was deliberate as opposed to sloppy.

The crucial question therefore is whether the Harvard investigation was right to rule out an innocent explanation of the Cognition data. Altmann correctly says that either Harvard are wrong, or Hauser falsified data.

But the problem is that the details of Harvard's judgement remain private. So we (including Altmann) seem to be left with a question of whether to trust Harvard University and their internal investigation.

Marc Hauser's Scapegoat?

The dust is starting to settle after the Hauser-gate scandal which rocked psychology a couple of weeks back.

Harvard Professor Marc Hauser has been investigated by a faculty committee and the verdict was released on the 20th August: Hauser was "found solely responsible... for eight instances of scientific misconduct." He's taking a year's "leave", his future uncertain.

Unfortunately, there has been no official news on what exactly the misconduct was, and how much of Hauser's work is suspect. According to Harvard, only three publications were affected: a 2002 paper in Cognition, which has been retracted; a 2007 paper which has been "corrected" (see below), and another 2007 Science paper, which is still under discussion.

But what happened? Cognition editor Gerry Altmann writes that he was given access to some of the Harvard internal investigation. He concludes that Hauser simply invented some of the crucial data in the retracted 2002 paper.

Essentially, some monkeys were supposed to have been tested on two conditions, X and Y, and their responses were videotaped. The difference in the monkey's behaviour between the two conditions was the scientifically interesting outcome.

In fact, the videos of the experiment showed them being tested only on condition X. There was no video evidence that condition Y was even tested. The "data" from condition Y, and by extension the differences, were, apparently, simply made up.

If this is true, it is, in Altmann's words, "the worst form of academic misconduct." As he says, it's not quite a smoking gun: maybe tapes of Y did exist, but they got lost somehow. However, this seems implausible. If so, Hauser would presumably have told Harvard so in his defence. Yet they found him guilty - and Hauser retracted the paper.

So it seems that either Hauser never tested the monkeys on condition B at all, and just made up the data, or he did test them, saw that they weren't behaving the "right" way, deleted the videos... and just made up the data. Either way it's fraud.

Was this a one-off? The Cognition paper is the only one that's been retracted. But another 2007 paper was "replicated", with Hauser & a colleague recently writing:

In the original [2007] study by Hauser et al., we reported videotaped experiments on action perception with free ranging rhesus macaques living on the island of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. It has been discovered that the video records and field notes collected by the researcher who performed the experiments (D. Glynn) are incomplete for two of the conditions.

Luckily, Hauser said, when he and a colleague went back to Puerto Rico and repeated the experiment, they found "the exact same pattern of results" as originally reported. Phew.

This note, however, was sent to the journal in July, several weeks before the scandal broke - back when Hauser's reputation was intact. Was this an attempt by Hauser to pin the blame on someone else - David Glynn, who worked as a research assistant in Hauser's lab for three years, and has since left academia?

As I wrote in my previous post:

Glynn was not an author on the only paper which has actually been retracted [the Cognition 2002 paper that Altmann refers to]... according to his resume, he didn't arrive in Hauser's lab until 2005.

Glynn cannot possibly have been involved in the retracted 2002 paper. And Harvard's investigation concluded that Hauser was "solely responsible", remember. So we're to believe that Hauser, guilty of misconduct, was himself an innocent victim of some entirely unrelated mischief in 2007 - but that it was all OK in the end, because when Hauser checked the data, it was fine.

Maybe that's what happened. I am not convinced.

Personally, if I were David Glynn, I would want to clear my name. He's left science, but still, a letter to a peer reviewed journal accuses him of having produced "incomplete video records and field notes", which is not a nice thing to say about someone.

Hmm. On August 19th, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article about the case, based on a leaked Harvard document. They say that "A copy of the document was provided to The Chronicle by a former research assistant in the lab who has since left psychology."

Hmm. Who could blame them for leaking it? It's worth remembering that it was a research assistant in Hauser's lab who originally blew the whistle on the whole deal, according to the Chronicle.

Apparently, what originally rang alarm bells was that Hauser appeared to be reporting monkey behaviours which had never happened, according to the video evidence. So at least in that case, there were videos, and it was the inconsistency between Hauser's data and the videos that drew attention. This is what makes me suspect that maybe there were videos and field notes in every case, and the "inconvenient" ones were deleted to try to hide the smoking gun. But that's just speculation.

What's clear is that science owes the whistle-blowing research assistant, whoever it is, a huge debt.

Marc Hauser's Scapegoat?

The dust is starting to settle after the Hauser-gate scandal which rocked psychology a couple of weeks back.

Harvard Professor Marc Hauser has been investigated by a faculty committee and the verdict was released on the 20th August: Hauser was "found solely responsible... for eight instances of scientific misconduct." He's taking a year's "leave", his future uncertain.

Unfortunately, there has been no official news on what exactly the misconduct was, and how much of Hauser's work is suspect. According to Harvard, only three publications were affected: a 2002 paper in Cognition, which has been retracted; a 2007 paper which has been "corrected" (see below), and another 2007 Science paper, which is still under discussion.

But what happened? Cognition editor Gerry Altmann writes that he was given access to some of the Harvard internal investigation. He concludes that Hauser simply invented some of the crucial data in the retracted 2002 paper.

Essentially, some monkeys were supposed to have been tested on two conditions, X and Y, and their responses were videotaped. The difference in the monkey's behaviour between the two conditions was the scientifically interesting outcome.

In fact, the videos of the experiment showed them being tested only on condition X. There was no video evidence that condition Y was even tested. The "data" from condition Y, and by extension the differences, were, apparently, simply made up.

If this is true, it is, in Altmann's words, "the worst form of academic misconduct." As he says, it's not quite a smoking gun: maybe tapes of Y did exist, but they got lost somehow. However, this seems implausible. If so, Hauser would presumably have told Harvard so in his defence. Yet they found him guilty - and Hauser retracted the paper.

So it seems that either Hauser never tested the monkeys on condition B at all, and just made up the data, or he did test them, saw that they weren't behaving the "right" way, deleted the videos... and just made up the data. Either way it's fraud.

Was this a one-off? The Cognition paper is the only one that's been retracted. But another 2007 paper was "replicated", with Hauser & a colleague recently writing:

In the original [2007] study by Hauser et al., we reported videotaped experiments on action perception with free ranging rhesus macaques living on the island of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. It has been discovered that the video records and field notes collected by the researcher who performed the experiments (D. Glynn) are incomplete for two of the conditions.

Luckily, Hauser said, when he and a colleague went back to Puerto Rico and repeated the experiment, they found "the exact same pattern of results" as originally reported. Phew.

This note, however, was sent to the journal in July, several weeks before the scandal broke - back when Hauser's reputation was intact. Was this an attempt by Hauser to pin the blame on someone else - David Glynn, who worked as a research assistant in Hauser's lab for three years, and has since left academia?

As I wrote in my previous post:

Glynn was not an author on the only paper which has actually been retracted [the Cognition 2002 paper that Altmann refers to]... according to his resume, he didn't arrive in Hauser's lab until 2005.

Glynn cannot possibly have been involved in the retracted 2002 paper. And Harvard's investigation concluded that Hauser was "solely responsible", remember. So we're to believe that Hauser, guilty of misconduct, was himself an innocent victim of some entirely unrelated mischief in 2007 - but that it was all OK in the end, because when Hauser checked the data, it was fine.

Maybe that's what happened. I am not convinced.

Personally, if I were David Glynn, I would want to clear my name. He's left science, but still, a letter to a peer reviewed journal accuses him of having produced "incomplete video records and field notes", which is not a nice thing to say about someone.

Hmm. On August 19th, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article about the case, based on a leaked Harvard document. They say that "A copy of the document was provided to The Chronicle by a former research assistant in the lab who has since left psychology."

Hmm. Who could blame them for leaking it? It's worth remembering that it was a research assistant in Hauser's lab who originally blew the whistle on the whole deal, according to the Chronicle.

Apparently, what originally rang alarm bells was that Hauser appeared to be reporting monkey behaviours which had never happened, according to the video evidence. So at least in that case, there were videos, and it was the inconsistency between Hauser's data and the videos that drew attention. This is what makes me suspect that maybe there were videos and field notes in every case, and the "inconvenient" ones were deleted to try to hide the smoking gun. But that's just speculation.

What's clear is that science owes the whistle-blowing research assistant, whoever it is, a huge debt.

Hauser Of Cards

Update: Lots of stuff has happened since I wrote this post: see here for more.

A major scandal looks to be in progress involving Harvard Professor Marc Hauser, a psychologist and popular author whose research on the minds of chimpanzees and other primates is well-known and highly respected. The Boston Globe has the scoop and it's well worth a read (though you should avoid reading the comments if you react badly to stupid.)

Hauser's built his career on detailed studies of the cognitive abilities of non-human primates. He's generally argued that our closest relatives are smarter than people had previously believed, with major implications for evolutionary psychology. Now one of his papers has been retracted, another has been "corrected" and a third is under scrutiny. Hauser has also announced that he's taking a year off from his position at Harvard.

It's not clear what exactly is going on, but the problems seem to centre around videotapes of the monkeys that took part in Hauser's experiments. The story begins with a 2007 paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. That paper has just been amended in a statement that appeared in the same journal last month:

In the original study by Hauser et al., we reported videotaped experiments on action perception with free ranging rhesus macaques living on the island of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. It has been discovered that the video records and field notes collected by the researcher who performed the experiments (D. Glynn) are incomplete for two of the conditions.

The authors of the original paper were Hauser, David Glynn and Justin Wood. In the amendment, which is authored by Hauser and Wood i.e. not Glynn, they say that upon discovering the issues with Glynn's data, they went back to Puerto Rico, did the studies again, and confirmed that the original results were valid. Glynn left academia in 2007, to work for a Boston company, Innerscope Research, according to this online resume.

If that was the whole of the scandal it wouldn't be such a big deal, but according to the Boston Globe, that was just the start. David Glynn was also an author on a second paper which is now under scrutiny. It was published in Science 2007, with the authors listed as Wood, Glynn, Brenda Phillips and Hauser.

However, crucially, Glynn was not an author on the only paper which has actually been retracted, "Rule learning by cotton-top tamarins". This appeared in the journal Cognition in 2002. The three authors were Hauser, Daniel Weiss and Gary Marcus. David Glynn wasn't mentioned in the acknowledgements section either, and according to his resume, he didn't arrive in Hauser's lab until 2005.

So the problem, whatever it is, is not limited to Glynn.

Not was Glynn an author on the final paper mentioned in the Boston Globe, a 1995 article by Hauser, Kralik, Botto-Mahan, Garrett, and Oser. Note that the Globe doesn't say that this paper is formally under investigation, but rather, that it was mentioned in an interview by researcher Gordon G. Gallup who says that when he viewed the videotapes of the monkeys from that study, he didn't observe the behaviours which Hauser et al. said were present. Gallup is famous for his paper "Does Semen Have Antidepressant Properties?" in which he examined the question of whether semen... oh, guess.

The crucial issue for scientists is whether the problems are limited to the three papers that have so far been officially investigated or whether it goes further: that's an entirely open question right now.

In Summary: We don't know what is going on here and it would be premature to jump to conclusions. However, the only author who appears on all of the papers known to be under scrutiny, is Marc Hauser himself.

Hauser MD, Weiss D, & Marcus G (2002). Rule learning by cotton-top tamarins. Cognition, 86 (1) PMID: 12208654

Hauser MD, Glynn D, & Wood J (2007). Rhesus monkeys correctly read the goal-relevant gestures of a human agent. Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, 274 (1620), 1913-8 PMID: 17540661

Wood JN, Glynn DD, Phillips BC, & Hauser MD (2007). The perception of rational, goal-directed action in nonhuman primates. Science (New York, N.Y.), 317 (5843), 1402-5 PMID: 17823353

Hauser MD, Kralik J, Botto-Mahan C, Garrett M, & Oser J (1995). Self-recognition in primates: phylogeny and the salience of species-typical features. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 92 (23), 10811-14 PMID: 7479889

Hauser Of Cards

Update: Lots of stuff has happened since I wrote this post: see here for more.

A major scandal looks to be in progress involving Harvard Professor Marc Hauser, a psychologist and popular author whose research on the minds of chimpanzees and other primates is well-known and highly respected. The Boston Globe has the scoop and it's well worth a read (though you should avoid reading the comments if you react badly to stupid.)

Hauser's built his career on detailed studies of the cognitive abilities of non-human primates. He's generally argued that our closest relatives are smarter than people had previously believed, with major implications for evolutionary psychology. Now one of his papers has been retracted, another has been "corrected" and a third is under scrutiny. Hauser has also announced that he's taking a year off from his position at Harvard.

It's not clear what exactly is going on, but the problems seem to centre around videotapes of the monkeys that took part in Hauser's experiments. The story begins with a 2007 paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. That paper has just been amended in a statement that appeared in the same journal last month:

In the original study by Hauser et al., we reported videotaped experiments on action perception with free ranging rhesus macaques living on the island of Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. It has been discovered that the video records and field notes collected by the researcher who performed the experiments (D. Glynn) are incomplete for two of the conditions.

The authors of the original paper were Hauser, David Glynn and Justin Wood. In the amendment, which is authored by Hauser and Wood i.e. not Glynn, they say that upon discovering the issues with Glynn's data, they went back to Puerto Rico, did the studies again, and confirmed that the original results were valid. Glynn left academia in 2007, to work for a Boston company, Innerscope Research, according to this online resume.

If that was the whole of the scandal it wouldn't be such a big deal, but according to the Boston Globe, that was just the start. David Glynn was also an author on a second paper which is now under scrutiny. It was published in Science 2007, with the authors listed as Wood, Glynn, Brenda Phillips and Hauser.

However, crucially, Glynn was not an author on the only paper which has actually been retracted, "Rule learning by cotton-top tamarins". This appeared in the journal Cognition in 2002. The three authors were Hauser, Daniel Weiss and Gary Marcus. David Glynn wasn't mentioned in the acknowledgements section either, and according to his resume, he didn't arrive in Hauser's lab until 2005.

So the problem, whatever it is, is not limited to Glynn.

Not was Glynn an author on the final paper mentioned in the Boston Globe, a 1995 article by Hauser, Kralik, Botto-Mahan, Garrett, and Oser. Note that the Globe doesn't say that this paper is formally under investigation, but rather, that it was mentioned in an interview by researcher Gordon G. Gallup who says that when he viewed the videotapes of the monkeys from that study, he didn't observe the behaviours which Hauser et al. said were present. Gallup is famous for his paper "Does Semen Have Antidepressant Properties?" in which he examined the question of whether semen... oh, guess.

The crucial issue for scientists is whether the problems are limited to the three papers that have so far been officially investigated or whether it goes further: that's an entirely open question right now.

In Summary: We don't know what is going on here and it would be premature to jump to conclusions. However, the only author who appears on all of the papers known to be under scrutiny, is Marc Hauser himself.

Hauser MD, Weiss D, & Marcus G (2002). Rule learning by cotton-top tamarins. Cognition, 86 (1) PMID: 12208654

Hauser MD, Glynn D, & Wood J (2007). Rhesus monkeys correctly read the goal-relevant gestures of a human agent. Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, 274 (1620), 1913-8 PMID: 17540661

Wood JN, Glynn DD, Phillips BC, & Hauser MD (2007). The perception of rational, goal-directed action in nonhuman primates. Science (New York, N.Y.), 317 (5843), 1402-5 PMID: 17823353

Hauser MD, Kralik J, Botto-Mahan C, Garrett M, & Oser J (1995). Self-recognition in primates: phylogeny and the salience of species-typical features. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 92 (23), 10811-14 PMID: 7479889