On Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:51:57 -0700, Jim Clark wrote: >Hi > >Article in Boston Globe about Mark Hauser and ethical issues about his >research. > http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/08/10/author_on_leave_after_harvard_inquiry/ > >Unfortunately, allegations for which Hauser has accepted >responsibility are stated so cryptically as to be impossible >to know precisely what the ethical lapse was. Reading >between the lines, it appears that there was some gap >between actual videotapes of monkey behavior and encoding >(presumably by judges) of their behaviors.
A hint as to what the problem might be is given in the following quote from the Boston Globe article: |In 1995, he was the lead author of a paper in the Proceedings |of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at whether |cotton-top tamarins are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. |Self-recognition was something that set humans and other primates, |such as chimpanzees and orangutans, apart from other animals, |and no one had shown that monkeys had this ability. | |Gordon G. Gallup Jr., a professor of psychology at State University |of New York at Albany, questioned the results and requested |videotapes that Hauser had made of the experiment. | |“When I played the videotapes, 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,’’ |Gallup said in an interview. | |In 1997, he co-authored a critique of the original paper, and Hauser |and a co-author responded with a defense of the work. | |In 2001, in a study in the American Journal of Primatology, Hauser |and colleagues reported that they had failed to replicate the results |of the previous study. The original paper has never been retracted or |corrected. This to seems to be an issue of coding behaviors which raises the question of who coded the behaviors and was the coding double-checked. In addition to poor supervision, this may also reflect the operation of the confirmation bias in that weak or equivocal evidence was interpreted as supporting the research hypothesis. What is also disturbing is that there has been no retraction or correction of the 1995 paper. >Perhaps unlikely that Hauser was the one doing the encoding ... so was >his lapse inadequate supervision/verification? Could be but it would just be speculation at this time. What I find troubling is that NYU's Gary Marcus (whom I do not know personally) was co-author of the retracted paper and he relied on the data summaries provided to him by Hauser. This raises questions about the nature of research collaboration and the extent to which collaborators should have a "trust but verify" attitude towards the contributions of the collaborators. Trust is a big factor in any collaboration but this type of situation shows the importance of not trusting too much. >Perhaps others know more. If they do, they probably will be quiet until official statements about what happened have been released. It may be wise to say anything that could lead to a charge of libel/slander. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=4101 or send a blank email to leave-4101-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
