Is this much ado about little? If Hauser insisted the behavior of some monkeys meant one thing, and some of his students insisted it didn’t, what does that have to do with the foundational thinking behind Moral Minds? Wade’s NYT article points out that Hauser’s output has been “prolific.” Getting caught up in the drive to reach findings that support your ideas is understandable. Is fudging coding of behavior in a few experiments based on observation of monkeys just cause to make Hauser a pariah?  From Hauser’s Wikipedia page: Frans de Waal 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 [which stated that Hauser had been found responsible for exactly eight counts of misconduct], it seems that all data produced by this lab over the years are potentially in question.” What do others think?

You don't have permission to flag this entry.

Well, looks like I can answer my own question. There is evidence that Hauser didn’t just, in the opinion of his students, “misinterpret” actions and code them improperly. There’s evidence he MADE UP data… Really sad, but that’s the worst possible offense against science.

From the Boston Globe:

The editor of a scientific journal said today the only “plausible” conclusion he can draw, on the basis of access he has been given to an investigation of prominent Harvard psychology professor Marc Hauser’s research, is that data were fabricated.

Gerry Altmann, the editor of the journal Cognition, which is retracting a 2002 article in which Hauser is the lead author, said that he had been given access to information from an internal Harvard investigation related to that paper. That investigation found that the paper reported data that was not present in the videotape record that researchers make of the experiment.

“The paper reports data … but there was no such data existing on the videotape. These data are depicted in the paper in a graph,” Altmann said. “The graph is effectively a fiction and the statistic that is supplied in the main text is effectively a fiction.”

You don't have permission to flag this entry.