Marc Hauser, a Harvard academic who gained prominence with the publication of a book on the origin of morality, has gone on leave after an investigation by the university into problems with his research.
Dr. Hauser, whose field is the comparison of human and animal minds, is the author of "Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong."
A Harvard press officer, Jeff Neal, at first refused to confirm that Dr. Hauser was on leave or that Harvard had conducted any investigation. But a message on Dr. Hauser's laboratory phone says he will be on leave until the fall of 2011, and at least two scientific journals are acknowledging problems in Dr. Hauser's articles that were brought to light by an internal Harvard inquiry.
The journal Cognition published an article by Dr. Hauser and others in 2002 saying that tamarin monkeys could learn certain rules much as human infants do. The journal is about to run a retraction saying that an internal examination by Harvard "found that the data do not support the reported findings."
"We therefore are retracting this article," it continues. "MH accepts responsibility for the error." The initials M.H. refer to Dr. Hauser.
Harvard's silence about the nature of the problem in Dr. Hauser's laboratory has stirred concern among other researchers who fear their field will be discredited unless the full facts are made known.
"I think that Harvard has to make public what they found," said Herbert Terrace, a professor of psychology at Columbia University. "They say they have to protect Harvard and Hauser, but how about protecting the field?"
Dr. Hauser is one of Harvard's most visible academics, being frequently quoted in articles about language, animals' cognitive abilities and the biological basis of morality. He is widely regarded as a star in his field.
In a widely noticed book of 2006, "Moral Minds," he argued that a universal moral grammar is genetically wired into the human mind, similar to the universal grammar posited by Noam Chomsky to underlie the language faculty. Dr. Hauser is currently working on a book called "Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad."
Dr. Hauser is a fluent and persuasive writer, and his undoing seems to have been his experiments, many of which depended on videotaping cotton-topped tamarin monkeys and noting their responses. It is easy for human observers to see the response they want and so to be fooled by the monkeys.
Dr. Terrace said there had been problems for some time with Dr. Hauser's work.
"First there was arbitrary interpretation of the videotapes to suit the hypothesis," he said. "The other was whether the data was real. There have been a number of papers using videotape, and all of them have to be reviewed to see if the data holds up."
Dr. Terrace noted that it was easy for a researcher to see what he wanted in a videotaped animal's reactions, and that independent observers must check every finding.
In one case, according to an article in The Boston Globe on Tuesday, Gordon G. Gallup Jr. of the State University of New York at Albany asked Dr. Hauser for videotapes of an experiment in which cotton-topped tamarins were said to recognize themselves in a mirror. When he received the videotapes, Dr. Gallup could see no evidence that this was the case. Dr. Gallup did not return a call or respond to e-mail on Wednesday.
Dr. Hauser's 2002 article in Cognition was published with two co-authors, but he has accepted responsibility for the error. One co-author, Gary Marcus of New York University, said he saw the summary of Dr. Hauser's experiments but not the raw data. He was informed that there was a problem with the data, but has not seen the result of the investigation.
Mr. Neal, Harvard's press officer, declined to say when the university's examination of Dr. Hauser's laboratory had started, when it was completed or how many other papers besides that in Cognition were under question.
Another paper with problems appeared in Science magazine in 2007. It addressed the question of whether tamarins, rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees could infer a person's intentions. The magazine received a letter in June from Justin Wood of the University of South California, the senior co-author of the paper. Ginger Pinholster, director of public relations for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science, said that Dr. Wood wrote that a Harvard examination of the paper had failed to find any field notes or records associated with the rhesus monkey part of the experiment, and that he and Dr. Hauser had then repeated the experiment with the same results as reported. There was no problem with the records on the tamarins or chimpanzees.
If Dr. Hauser's leave is over next fall, he may return to a full work schedule at Harvard. But the cloud over his experiments seems unlikely to be dispelled until the nature and extent of the problem is clarified.
"The people who really know what's happened are students, current and former," said a scientist who asked to remain anonymous because of Dr. Hauser's continuing power in the field. "They are very unhappy about how Harvard has handled this, and they feel things are being swept under the rug."
First Published: August 12, 2010, 6:00 a.m.
