(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
I’ve spent a lot of time mocking Mark Hauser on this blog, and I still find it annoying that, according to the accounts I’ve seen, he behaved unethically toward his graduate students and lab assistants, he never apologized for manipulating data, and, perhaps most unconscionably, he wasted the lives of who knows how many monkeys in discredited experiments.
But, fine, nobody’s perfect. On the plus side—and I’m serious about this—it seems that Hauser was not kidding when, upon getting kicked out of his position as a Harvard professor, he said he’d be working with at-risk kids.
Here’s the website for his organization, Risk Eraser. I’m in no position to evaluate this work, and I’d personally think twice before hiring someone with a track record of faking data, but I looked at the people listed on his advisory board and they include Steven Pinker and Susan Carey, two professors in the Harvard Psychology Department. This is notable because Hauser dragged that department into the muck, and Pinker and Carey, as much as almost anybody, would have reason to be angry with him. But they are endorsing his new project. This suggest that these two well-respected researchers, who know Hauser much better than I do (that is, more than zero!) have some trust in him, they think his project is real and that it’s doing some good.
That’s wonderful news. Hauser is clearly a man of many talents, even if experimental psychology is not his strong point, and, no joke, no sarcasm at all, I’m so happy to see that he is using these talents productively. He’s off the academic hamster wheel and doing something real with his life. An encouraging example for Michael Lacour, Diederik Stapel, Jonah Lehrer, Team Power Pose, Team Himmicanes, and all the rest. (I think Weggy and Dr. Anil Potti are beyond recovery, though.)
We all make mistakes in various aspects of life, and let’s hope we can all turn things around in the manner of Marc Hauser, to forget about trying to be a “winner” and to just move forward and help others. I imagine Hauser is feeling good about this life shift as well, taking the effort he was spending trying to be a public intellectual and to stay ahead of the curve in science, and just trying to help others.
P.S. You might feel that I’m being too hard on Hauser here: even while celebrating his redemption I can’t resist getting in some digs on his data manipulation. But that’s kinda the point: even if Hauser has not fully reformed his ways, maybe especially if that is the case, his redemption is an inspiring story. In reporting this I’m deliberately not oversimplifying; I’m not trying to claim that Hauser has resolved all his issues. He still, to my knowledge, has shown neither contrition nor even understanding of why it’s scientifically and professionally wrong to lie about and hide your data. But he’s still moved on to something useful (at least, I’ll take the implicit word of Carey and Pinker on this one, I don’t know any of these people personally). And that’s inspiring. It’s good to know that redemption can be achieved even without a full accounting for one’s earlier actions.
P.P.S. Some commenters share snippets from Hauser’s Risk Eraser program and some of it sounds kinda hype-y. So perhaps I was too charitable in my quick assessment above.
Hauser may be “trying to help others” (as I wrote above), but that doesn’t mean his methods will actually help.
For example, they offer “the iWill game kit, a package of work-out routines that can help boost your students’ willpower through training.” And then they give the following reference:
Baumeister, R.F. (2012). Self-control: the moral muscle. The Psychologist.
We’ve heard of this guy before; he’s in the can’t replicate and won’t admit it club. Also this, which looks like another PPNAS-style mind-over-matter bit of p-hacking:
Job, V., Walton, G.M., Bernecker, K. & Dweck, C.S. (2013). Beliefs about willpower determine the impact of glucose on self-control. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
OK, so what’s going on here? I was giving Hauser the benefit of the doubt because of the endorsements from Pinker and Carey, who are some serious no-bullshit types.
But maybe that inference was a mistake on my part. One possibility is that Pinker and Carey fell for the Ted-talking Baumeuster PPNAS hype, just like so many others in their profession. Another possibility is that they feel sorry for Hauser and agreed to be part of his program as a way to help out their old friend. This one seems hard to imagine—given what Hauser did to the reputation of their department, I’d think they’d be furious at the guy, but who knows?
Too bad. I really liked the story of redemption, but this Risk Eraser thing seems not so different from what Hauser was doing before: shaky science and fast talking, with the main difference being that this time he’s only involved in the “fast talking” part. Baumeister indeed. Why not go whole hog and start offering power pose training and ESP?
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