Some researchers said they saw the Science statement as a step toward the eventual exoneration of Dr. Hauser, an animal psychologist who specializes in the cognition and behavior of monkeys, while others said it had little bearing on the overall case against him. He is now on administrative leave,?unable?to teach classes; in February, the psychology department voted to?bar him from teaching for the coming academic year as well.
Dr. Hauser became known to a wider audience through his 2007 book “Moral Minds,” which argued that people have an innate sense of morality. But his career was jeopardized when his students complained about his research methods, prompting an inquiry by the Harvard faculty.
Though the precise charges have never been published, the faculty dean said they concerned three published articles and five unpublished articles. In two of the published articles, the inquiry found, Dr. Hauser could not locate the original data, prompting him and a colleague to redo the original experiments and submit the new data to the journals that had published the results, Science and Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
In a third article, published in Cognition in 2002, the data did not support the published results, a serious problem that has not yet been explained. Dr. Hauser retracted the article last year without admitting misconduct.
Given the problems with the Cognition article, the absence of the original data for the Science article suggested some more serious failing than bad archiving practices: that perhaps, for instance, the reported experiments had never been done. But Science’s referees seem to have assuaged such concerns by reviewing the submitted videotapes and other raw data and concluding, in a statement released Monday, that the results “replicate those reported in the original paper in terms of statistical significance.”
The case against Dr. Hauser is being reviewed by?the Office of Research Integrity, a government agency that investigates scientific misconduct, and both sides are meant to keep mum until the findings are released. But that has not stopped others from weighing in.
“The fact that two of the three published papers have now been replicated and the third has been withdrawn suggests something is wrong, and it’s not with Hauser,” said Bennett G. Galef Jr., an expert on animal behavior at McMaster University in Ontario. He said he believed Harvard’s inquiry was at fault.
The loss of original data for two papers may be sloppiness but does not amount to misconduct, Dr. Galef said, as is the case with the unpublished papers. “How in the world can they get in trouble for data they didn’t publish?” he asked. The only serious issue, in Dr. Galef’s view, concerns the Cognition article. “There’s no question that experiment was very deeply flawed,” he said.
Dr. Galef, because of his interest in research ethics, was asked by Dr. Hauser last year to review Harvard’s charges against him and concluded, based on material made available by Dr. Hauser’s lawyers, that the accusations were unfounded. But others in the field put a more guarded interpretation on the Science report.
Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, said it might be legally helpful to Dr. Hauser. “But his fellow scientists will be more focused on evaluating his reputation, and that may depend more heavily on the credibility of the people who had expressed concerns than on whether any particular study can be replicated,” he said.
Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany, said, “To the extent this satisfied the people at Science it’s fine, but it doesn’t mean the issue is resolved.”
Bruce Alberts, the editor of Science, explained that “Science did not seek to confirm or refute Harvard’s broader findings; we sought only to determine whether the original findings could be replicated, and they were.”
A Harvard spokesman, Jeff Neal, said that the university was glad to see that concerns about the scientific record were being addressed but did not respond to a question about whether scientific misconduct was still an issue with the Science article.
Dr. Hauser said in an e-mail that he was pleased that Science’s publication of his data would let others examine his results.
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