Wrong Way to Get it Right

If anyone could have understood – really understood – the implications and mechanisms of Marc Hauser’s monkey business, it was Hauser himself. And not just because the star Harvard evolutionary biologist was the one who, according to an internal school investigation, is “solely responsible” for eight instances of scientific misconduct, involving three published papers and five other pieces of research.

It’s because bad behavior was a central focus of Hauser’s work on animal and human cognition. And yet, as he explained to me in June, his research is also about how tricky it is for us to think about blame, especially as it applies to psychopaths, who simply don’t seem to care about their behavior, be it bad or good. It’s a problem that’s relevant for more than just thinking about the Madoffs out there, or even the Hausers, if his crime is real. We’re all a little guilty of something: the question is what, and how do we recognize it?

See a video Q+A with Marc Hauser from June.

Think about it: how do we assign intention to – and how do we blame – someone who has done something wrong if that something was done “unintentionally”? Hauser’s questionable research (essentially, involving interpreting how chimpanzees and humans may share perceptive abilities) is a notoriously tricky and subjective business, based on trying to determine a chimpanzee’s thoughts by where she looks.

That doesn’t mean he’s not responsible, but it does beg the question of how intentional he was. The issue is that he didn’t seem to care, perhaps because he had other priorities, like speed, and, of course, convincing the world of his theories.

Or it shouldn’t, but it probably does: any scientist is subject to the pressures of the academy, of grant-making, of narcissism. Outside of the scientific community (where he is now being ostracized), will Marc Hauser be blamed for his series of mistakes in the court of public opinion – and possibly federal court? (He received federal grant money, so the government is now investigating.)

Or will he be forgiven on some level, because he made “mistakes”, because he’s a fallible human being, because he was under some unknown pressure, because he didn’t fully realize the import of what he was doing? Might final judgement also have to do with how much impact his errors will have on his field, something we can’t yet know? The Economist touches on that concern, pointing more to the danger of Hauser’s errors for the reputation of a difficult science, not for its results.

Perhaps since I had encountered Hauser’s compelling work before – and had even been a test subject in one of his moral sense studies, and have friends who worked for him (who have had nothing negative to say) – I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. This trust instinct sounds like fodder, probably, for Hauser, or at least his colleagues.

Then again, will any of that really matter? In science, justification and intent have little to do with the real goal: testing and verifying ideas. Perhaps Hauser has given us (if not himself) another subject for neuroscience and biology to study, or at least for researchers to cope with on their own: how we try to prove ourselves right, even when we know we’re doing it wrong.