The New York Times goes off campus to collect some detail on the case.
Gordon G. Gallup, the psychologist who invented the mirror test and established that only humans, chimps and orangutans could recognize their own image, was skeptical of Dr. Hauser’s result and asked to see videotapes of the experiment.
Dr. Hauser provided them. But “there wasn’t even any suggestive evidence,” said Dr. Gallup, who is at the State University of New York in Albany. “It was like a complete disconnect between what appeared in the paper and what I saw on the tapes.” Dr. Hauser at first disputed Dr. Gallup’s judgment but in 2001 reported that he had failed to replicate the earlier result.
Dr. Hauser, 50, was trained by two researchers renowned for the rigor of their field work on animal behavior, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania. “Marc was our first graduate student,” Dr. Seyfarth said. “But many years ago, we decided that Marc’s way of doing things and ours were not really the same. We just differed about our approach to research.”
One reason, Dr. Seyfarth said, was that he and Dr. Cheney studied animals in natural conditions, where the pace of data collection is much slower, whereas Dr. Hauser had moved into studying captive animals…
Whatever the problems in Dr. Hauser’s lab, they eventually led to an insurrection among his staff, said Michael Tomasello, a psychologist who is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and shares Dr. Hauser’s interest in cognition and language.
“Three years ago,” Dr. Tomasello said, “when Marc was in Australia, 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.”
Also, science writer David Dobbs is a all over the story on this Neuronculture blog.
This feedback itself warrants cautious reception, as it’s anonymous. (Anonymity may be necessary, but it still warrants caution.) But if this case is anywhere near this serious — if multiple former students are accusing Hauser of outright fabrication, or if many others in the discipline have harbored grave doubts about the integrity of the data — then this case turns us back to the perennial question of how to curb such shenanigans.