Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey

In the latest scientific scandal, an internal investigation at Harvard University concludes that Marc D. Hause, their star evolutionary psychologist, is guilty of scientific misconduct for falsifying research on monkeys .

Earlier this month, the Boston Globe reported that Hauser, 50, the author of Moral minds: How nature designed a universal sense of right and wrong , a noted researcher in the roots of animal cognition, had been placed on leave following accusations by his students that he had purposely fabricated data in his research. His work relied on observing responses by tamarin monkeys to stimuli such as changes in sound patterns, claiming they possessed thinking skills often viewed as unique to humans and apes.

The experiment that Hauser falsified was rather simple :

The experiment tested the ability of rhesus monkeys to recognize sound patterns. Researchers played a series of three tones (in a pattern like A-B-A) over a sound system. After establishing the pattern, they would vary it (for instance, A-B-B) and see whether the monkeys were aware of the change. If a monkey looked at the speaker, this was taken as an indication that a difference was noticed.

The method has been used in experiments on primates and human infants. Mr. Hauser has long worked on studies that seemed to show that primates, like rhesus monkeys or cotton-top tamarins, can recognize patterns as well as human infants do. Such pattern recognition is thought to be a component of language acquisition.

Hauser claimed that the monkeys turned their heads when they heard the patterns; they didn’t.

At this point, you might be wondering what this type of research has to do with anything and how much it can really tell us about human psychology. So let’s look at the description of his book:

[Hauser] argues that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Experience tunes up our moral actions, guiding what we do as opposed to how we deliver our moral verdicts.

For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that moral judgments arise from rational and voluntary deliberations about what ought to be. The common belief today is that we reach moral decisions by consciously reasoning from principled explanations of what society determines is right or wrong. This perspective has generated the further belief that our moral psychology is founded entirely on experience and education, developing slowly and subject to considerable variation across cultures. In his groundbreaking book, Hauser shows that this dominant view is illusory.

For hundreds of years scholars believed that humans reasoned their way into moral judgments. Hauser comes along, runs some experiments that involve things like monkeys turning their heads when they hear sounds, and concludes that everyone else had it wrong: the moral instinct of human and other primates is all in our genes.

This is what passes for science at Harvard.

Of course, goofy theories about human psychology are nothing new. The human race spent far too many years believing that an infant’s relationship to his own excrement would determine his personality. A world that can take Freud seriously is a world that will believe anything .

But everyone eventually acknowledged that Freud’s theories weren’t scientific. How long before we wise up and recognize the same about “evolutionary psychology”?