… and more characterize the Marc Hauser misconduct story. The journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science attempts to clarify things.

With Marc Hauser as background, Gerald Koocher, in an NPR interview, spells out some categories of research fraud.

… The kinds of things that the federal government focuses on for federally funded research is mostly what’s called F, F and P: fabrication, which is making up data out of whole cloth; falsification, which is modifying your data to fit your needs; or plagiarism, passing off someone else’s work as your own.

But we are also concerned, for example, about questionable authorship practices, where you take credit for something that someone else really did most of the work on or where you list an honorific author in the hopes that their prestige will get you published, or when you are careless, such as sloppy record keeping, or when you intentionally rig your samples so that – or your methods so that you bias the results; when you don’t adequately supervise your research assistant so that some mistakes are made and never detected, and inappropriate data gets incorporated in the analyses…

A tamarin monkey named Wowzer
Worked closely with Dr. Marc Hauser.
Her lifestyle was fab
She had run of the lab
But nothing he did could arouse her.

… there was an

… insurrection among [Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser’s] staff… “[When] Marc was in Australia, [said an informed source], the university came in and seized his hard drives and videos because some students in his lab said, ‘Enough is enough.’ They said this was a pattern and they had specific evidence [of research fraud].”

Background here.

Not a peep out of Harvard all this time. They seem to have retracted one of his papers… or gotten him to retract it or something… But otherwise, three years after strong evidence of fraud on the part of one of its highest-profile faculty members, Harvard’s doing and saying nothing. Only because someone at Harvard leaked a letter about it to the press do we know anything.

The cover-up is beginning to look as bad as the scandal.

… readers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Language Log, a group blog dedicated to cognitive science.

If you’ve come here to scan UD‘s comments on the Marc Hauser story, here they are.

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UD has opinions about everything else, too, so feel free to poke around.

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, wrote this last month about the “moral naturalists,” a group of evolutionary psychologists who argue that we’ve evolved an innate moral grammar, rather like Chomsky’s innate linguistic grammar.

He features the work of Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser:

… Hauser … began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate. By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense.

Yet now, with a heavy-handed irony that seems more the realm of fiction than real life, Hauser’s own morality is in serious question. He has taken leave from Harvard as a major investigation into his possible research fraud continues.

As far back as fifteen years ago, Hauser’s methods and results were being seriously challenged. He routinely seems to make claims about primate behavior unsupported by evidence, and has already retracted one influential paper.

“If scientists can’t trust published papers,” comments a fellow researcher, “the whole process breaks down.’’

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The subtitle of Hauser’s forthcoming book deepens the irony: Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.

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UPDATE: Interesting to see that, back in ’06, Richard Rorty sensed some bullshit at work here.

The exuberant triumphalism of the prologue to “Moral Minds” leads the reader to expect that Hauser will lay out criteria for distinguishing parochial moral codes from universal principles, and will offer at least a tentative list of those principles. These expectations are not fulfilled. The vast bulk of “Moral Minds” consists of reports of experimental results, but Hauser does very little to make clear how these results bear on his claim that there is a “moral voice of our species.”

Via her reader, Seelye, UD learns of the latest iteration of way-bogus psychology scholarship.

She’s named Francesca Giro and she has a really cool website.

We’re all looking for easy steps to a better brighter you, and Happiness + Efficiency experts oblige us with studies showing that, like, thinking of eating meat makes you more boorish and less social. (I read this particular result, from world-famous Diederik Stapel, to Mr UD, who laughed merrily.) H+E experts (Dan Ariely – a co-author of Francesca Giro’s! – Marc Hauser – who shares with Giro the Harvard affiliation – Jens Förster, etc.) are always flooring us with amazing whodathunkits, and we fall for this shit every single time cuz it comes out of Harvard or cuz we just want to believe it or because we’re thrilled by the weird.

But Uri Simonsohn (a name known to readers of this blog) doesn’t fall for it. At all. He finds discipline-destroying lies enraging, and sets about, with a couple of colleagues, to keep the field reasonably clean through exposure of research fraud. The miscreants make stuff up and manipulate numbers in order to keep generating attention-grabbing amazements and giving amazing TED talks re: the amazements and Uri’s right behind them, running the numbers.

How can we protect ourselves from marauding high-profile psych frauds?

Step One: If something sounds bogus, it’s probably bogus.

Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard psychology professor who took leave after University investigators said he was responsible for scientific misconduct, will teach two courses at the Harvard Extension School this academic year even though he is facing a federal inquiry.

Way bad call. This is a swiftly moving story, its latest charge fabrication of evidence. Things could get worse still. Having Hauser on your active teaching faculty communicates cluelessness as to the seriousness of the case against him.