Fraud and Fallible Judgement

Deception in the Social and Behavioural Sciences

David Marsland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138523777
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351289023
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Fraud and Fallible Judgment is both an exploration of fraud and an examination of the nature of truth in social relations and experience. The essaysin this volume are concerned with deception in the social and behavioral sciences, and conditions that elicit deceptive behavior among scientists, whatever then-discipline. The issue of fraud in the social sciences moves far beyond a simple dictionary definition of duplicity. Errors in experimentation are less definite and less concrete than they are in the physical sciences. Fraud in the social sciences ranges from simple plagiarism of data and ideas to quiet suppression of information.The essays in 'Fraud and Fallible Judgment' raise issues of professional judgment from self-policing to academic policy. Episodes of misconduct in research, once resolved within the academic or scientific community, are now commanding media attention on an unprecedented scale. One net effect over the long term may prove to be that public confidence in the research enterprise has been irretrievably weakened (likewise, perhaps, public willingness to invest tax dollars in the support of that enterprise). Allegations of fraud can also be used to destroy careers. Once maligned, a reputation may never be repaired. The very act of writing on the subject with candor and intelligence is itself an act of rare courage. Contributions to this volume include: David Goodstein, "The Fading Myth of the Noble Scientist"; J. Phillipe Rushton, "Cyril Hurt as the Victim of Scientific Hoax"; Del Thiessen and Robert Young, "Investigating Sexual Coercion"; and Marcel LaFollette, "The Silence of the Social Sciences." This volume is an ideal text for students and scientists in all areas of the social and behavioral sciences, particularly psychologists and sociologists.

1
Deception, Fraud, and Fallible Judgment

Nathaniel J. Pallone and James J. Hennessy

This volume concerns itself with deception in the social and behavioral sciences and with social science perspectives on conditions that elicit deceptive behavior among scientists, whatever their discipline. As David Goodstein forcefully demonstrates in his chapter, the myth of the noble scientist has been severely challenged (or perhaps laid to rest), both in this country and abroad, in the wake of widespread public awareness of malfeasance among sometimes highly visible members of the scientific community. Episodes of misconduct in research once resolved or “handled” in camera within the academic or scientific community now command media attention on an unprecedented scale. One net effect over the long term may prove to be that public confidence in the research enterprise (and, concomitantly, public willingness to invest tax dollars in the support of that enterprise) has been irretrievably weakened. Another may be that the specter of public humiliation attendant upon the discovery of misconduct may constitute a deterrent extraordinarily more powerful by several degrees of magnitude than the relatively mild sanctions typically associated with in camera proceedings.

Since 1990, the press has reported, often in blaring headlines, a number of cases of real or apparent misconduct among members of the scientific community:

• As a result both of his failure to monitor the activity of a junior colleague and of what was widely interpreted as an effort either to minimize, to cover up, or to “stonewall” the situation, a Nobel Laureate resigns as president of one of the nation’s most prestigious research universities. The junior colleague fabricated results that were reported in a research paper. Although the Nobel Laureate had little to do with the study, he allowed his name to be affixed to the paper, which was published in a scholarly journal. Science (May 10,1991) headlines its story: “Baltimore Throws in the Towel.” More ominously, the New Republic (May 18,1992) titles its account “The Science Mob."
• Systematic deception over a period of thirteen years surfaces when it is learned that a Canadian physician cooperating with researchers at a major U.S. medical school had reported fictitious results, on the basis of which the principal investigators had advised the medical community worldwide that a “less radical” surgical procedure than mastectomy had proven effective treating cancer of the breast. Although the principal investigators had learned of the deceit years earlier, they had not retracted their claims in favor of the “less radical” procedure. Time (March 28, 1994) headlines its report “A Diagnosis of Deceit.”
• International litigation over patents erupts when a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health claims primacy in the discovery of the virus principally responsible for AIDS and for developing a blood-screening technique for its early detection likely to yield handsome royalties in the pharmaceutical market. The headline in Science (January 8, 1993): “NIH Scientist Guilty of Misconduct.”
• Nearly a decade after they had, apparently knowingly, placed HIV-con-taminated blood stocks for sale on the world market (and distributed such stock without charge to hemophiliacs in their own country), a veritable Who’s Who array of senior scientists in the French biomedical establishment is convicted of criminal wrong-doing. The New York Times’ (February 13,1994) headline: “Scandal Over Tainted Blood Widens in France.”
• Charges that a physician specializing in infertility performed artificial insemination using his own sperm rather than that obtained from properly licensed sperm banks leads the Washington Times (December 21, 1991) to trumpet “Fertility Doctor May Be Father of 75 Children.”

The misconduct alleged, whether “scientific” or “professional,” in these celebrated cases derives from the biomedical sciences. But only slightly less notoriety has attended allegations of fraud or misconduct, whether scientific or professional, in the social and behavioral sciences:

• A psychologist specializing in the study of severe retardation admits to fabricating data which purportedly demonstrate the superiority of one class of pharmacotherapeutic preparations in controlling the potentially self-destructive behavior of retardates; again, the stakes in the pharmaceutical marketplace are high. He is convicted of falsifying research data. His misdeeds are discovered and reported by a fellow psychologist at another university; the “whistle-blower” later receives the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Scientific Responsibility.
• Charges of misconduct are leveled against a research psychiatrist concerning his studies of the effects of low levels of exposure to lead on the cognitive development of children. After publication of that research fully a decade before misconduct is charged, the Centers for Disease Control had issued warnings about “danger thresholds” for lead exposure and the New York State legislature had enacted legislation that mandated statewide lead screening for pregnant women and young children, created a state registry listing all children with elevated lead levels, and established a Lead Poisoning Prevention Program within the State Department of Health; the social and economic costs associated with the policy implications of the research were thus massive. His accusers allege that, in the kindest reading, the psychiatrist had suppressed contrary evidence by “massaging” his data. The battle is waged in the press and in the courts as well as before scientific tribunals. The Washington Times (October 6, 1992), in a story headlined “Miscasting Lead as an Ecological Heavy,” complains that “money that could be spent on the threat of malnutrition, poor education, disrupted communities, and the blight of drugs that infests America’s urban centers is being redirected to focus on testing for lead.”
• A former seminarian alleges that the cardinal-archbishop of the nation’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese had sexually molested him years earlier while he was attending a preparatory seminary. The allegation is spread widely through print and television journalism and yields a veritable bonanza for “tabloid” programs. Though the accuser later withdraws the charges, the episode represents the most sensational of the cases of civil and criminal prosecution that pivot on the so-called “clinical technique” of reconstructing (sometimes under hypnosis, sometimes under the administration of “truth serum”) supposedly long-suppressed memories of childhood events which invariably result in the recollection of sexual abuse, frequently ritualized and sometimes even, in the judgment of one Harvard psychiatrist, perpetrated by extraterrestrial beings. The practitioners who specialize in this technique volubly and proudly describe themselves as “trauma-searchers” and are glorified as heroes and heroines in the never-ending search for covert atrocities in a panoply of trade books written by authors with weak scientific and academic credentials. The virtually universal judgment of the mental health sciences is that the “technique” constitutes sheer quackery and the establishment of a False Memory Syndrome Foundation to aid those accused as perpetrators in such “reconstructed” tales of past abuse (countered, to be sure, by a League of Lawyers for Survivors to press the claims of the accusers, at a fee of one-third the yield). Nonetheless, a judgment of $5 million has been levied against one such alleged abuser, while another serves a long prison sentence. Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters analyze the genesis of the woeful situation in their chapter in this volume.
• Researchers at a major university refine a technique called “facilitated communication” that presumably enables autistic children to communicate at levels indicative of high intellectual functioning, including in some instances the production of poetry of publishable quality. Under this technique, a “communications assistant” holds the arm of the autistic child as he or she types on a keyboard-like device; the assistant takes care to insure that the content of the child’s communication is in no way affected by his or her presence. The technique is greeted warmly by teachers, parents, and advocacy groups, and a major training center is established at the university. By the spring of 1993, the technique and its widespread adoption has engaged sufficient public attention that the Public Broadcasting Service’s television series “Nova” produces an hour-long documentary entitled “Prisoners of Silence.” Skepticism still pervades the scholarly community, where the prevalent view holds that controlled studies have failed to support the enthusiastic but unsupported claims made by proponents of the technique, a fact that PBS does not fail to notice.

It is a fair assessment that public confidence in the learned sciences and the learned professions erodes in direct proportion to the incidence and notoriety of such episodes. The flavor and perhaps depth of that skepticism can be gauged by the title syndicated writer Alston Chase chose for his column for October 7, 1991: “When Scientists Serve as Guns-for-Hire.” Chase rather cynically predicted that, inevitably, the response of the scientific community would involve the emergence of the empirical study of the determinants of fraud and deception as a scholarly specialty, followed to be sure by proposals to fund research fellowships so focused. As an antiphon, Time devoted its cover story for August 26,1991 to “Science Under Siege.”

Smaller Stakes, Minor Misdeeds?

Misconduct in biomedical research that leads to direct harm to patients, or that raises unrealistic hopes for “miracle cures,” is readily condemned as cruel and perhaps criminal. Not many events in psychological, sociological, or anthropological research either promise or deliver such cures; even cutting-edge research in the social and behavioral sciences has not yet reached the stage at which, in order to establish primacy of discovery in relation to patentable medications, devices, or procedures, findings are “published” via press conference rather than through the usual media for exchange of scientific information, a practice emerging in the biomedical sciences. The net effect of professional, as distinct from scientific, misconduct in the social and behavioral sciences is yet to be tolled.

In one of the few empirical studies of the relative incidence of serious misconduct across scientific disciplines, Princeton sociologist Patricia Woolf (1988) found that 80 percent of the cases she investigated had occurred in the biomedical sciences and only 8 percent in the behavioral sciences. Woolf’s 10:1 ratio is paralleled in the only public report (1992) issued by the Office of Scientific Integrity Review (an organization established in some large measure as a result of congressional reaction to revelations of the sort just litanized) of the U.S. Public Health Service, of which the National Institutes of Health is a component, and has since “merged” into the NIH-PHS Office of Research Integrity. Of the relatively miniscule number of cases of alleged misconduct in which OSIR had reached, during its entire life span, an adjudicatory determination of wrongdoing, 83 percent involved biomedical scientists, 8 percent physical scientists, and another 8 percent psychologists; no sociologists, anthropologists, historians, or policy analysts were either accused or adjudicated. The first (and as of this writing only) report of the Office of Research Integrity as its successor organization (1993) contains substantial more detail concerning complainants (“whistle-blowers”) and their relationship to alleged wrongdoers as well as information about the sanctions meted out, either through NIH-PHS or institutional channels, but curiously does not specify the disciplines in which the wrongdoing was alleged or was substantiated to have occurred.

Some observers, including David Goodstein later in this volume, might attribute a relatively greater incidence of scientific misconduct in the biomedical (and the physical) than in the social-behavioral sciences to the relatively higher “stakes” at issue. A cursory glance at the aggregate annual research expenditures of federal funding agencies (e.g., the National Institutes of Health and its myriad subunits and the several Department of Defense agencies vs., say, the several National Endowments and the agencies concerned with health, education, and welfare) relevant to each set of disciplines lends support to such an interpretation. But the variant research ethos in the biomedical sciences, the physical sciences, and the social-behavioral sciences may also play a contributing role. In the social-behavioral sciences, with some rare exceptions, the research enterprise still proceeds largely according to the nineteenth-century Teutonic model: the solitary investigator, alone in his or her laboratory or study, focusing on an inquiry that is appropriately limited (“one-investigator-wide”) in scope. This is not the case in the biomedical and physical sciences, where large teams of scientists in major laboratories, usually linked to each other in formal and informal national and international networks, address research issues of major scope and consume vast funds in the process. The latter ethos may provide more fertile ground for the rush to publish, the drive to establish primacy of discovery, the mutual aggrandizement of the members of one’s own research team through inclusion among a list of authors on a scientific paper of some members who have made no contribution to the study whatever so as to optimize the prospect for continued or fresh funding, and the frank fabrication of data.

The fact is that we have, at national scope, few viable mechanisms either to monitor, codify, or sanction episodes of research misconduct across disciplines. At the federal level, the agency that most closely approximates such a mechanism is the Office of Research Integrity within the NIH-PHS megalith, an organizational placement which virtually dictates that the complaints it receives, investigates, and adjudicates (or refers for prosecution) will be tilted strongly toward the biomedical sciences and, in essence, limited to scientists whose research funding has derived from the various subagencies within the megalith. Organizational entities with similar purviews are not found in major federal funding agencies; instead, the various directorates within the specific agencies are implicitly charged with monitoring research misconduct, but without formal and organized mechanisms for so doing. They lack the scope and influence of the ORI, precisely because of NIH’s pre-eminence as a dispenser of federal research monies, at least for investigations that are not “classified.”

In June 1994, the National Academy of Sciences sponsored a convocation concerned (perhaps slightly euphemistically) with the “integrity of scientific research.” Though peopled by conferees who included stellar names in the scientific enterprise, at least as recorded in a report in Science by Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy, and Kenneth Shine, president of the Academy’s Institute of Medicine, the general thrust of the convocation’s recommendations were relatively pale, emphasizing “preventative” approaches through mentorship, role modeling for young scientists and graduate students by senior persons of unquestioned probity, and perhaps even formal instruction in the ethics of the research enterprise. By implication, the tenor veered far from formal investigatory and sanctioning, especially through centralized authorities like the ORI.

Among the professional and scholarly associations in the social and behavioral sciences, the Ethics Committee of the American Psychological Association actively monitors and sanctions ethical violations, most often as a result of disciplinary action taken by a state licensure board. As reflected in the 1994 committee report, these tend to be cases of professional, rather than scientific misconduct, most frequently clustering around sexual liberties with clients, inappropriate fees, or advertising alleged to be misleading even by APA’s enormously elastic standards. Indeed, only one (representing 1.5 percent) of the complaints received by the APA Ethics Committee alleged scientific misconduct, and that concerned an authorship controversy. To ward off the temptation to sanctimony as they compare themselves to their “clinical” brethren, scientific psychologists need only recall the devastating impact of Julius Seeman’s (1969) analysis of experimental research in personality and social psychology, which clearly identified deception as the research methodology of choice from Sherif’s and Asch’s studies on social perception in the 1930s, through Festinger’s investigations on cognitive dissonance and Krech and Crutchfield’s on conformity in the 1950s, to Milgram’s studies on obedience and Zimbardo’s on the prisoner’s dilemma in the 1960s. Seeman’s work contributed directly to the inclusion of the social and behavioral sciences in the restrictions imposed by the then-emergent restrictive federal legislation on human subjects in funded research, originally targeted at the biomedical sciences, and effectively sounded a death knell for experimentation in personality and social psychology. If scientific deception among psychologists is today rarely brought to the attention of the APA, it may be because episodes of real or alleged misconduct are investigated and adjudicated at an “intramural” level by the institutional review boards in academic institutions and research centers subject to that legislation. Units in scholarly organizations in the other social and behavioral sciences with mandates similar to those of the APA Ethics Committee are neither so large, so well-organized, nor so active, perhaps because these sciences are not represented routinely in the arena of professional practice with direct client contact nor subject to state licensure.

Thus, one can only speculate about whether the cases of scientific misconduct that command media attention constitute the iceberg itself or merely its tip and about the distribution of misconduct among and between the several scholarly disciplines, whether across the sciences or across the social and behavioral sciences. The very lack of a coordinated set of mechanisms to monitor, codify, and sanction may itself reveal the normative expectation both within the scientific community and, until recently, within the public awareness that there is no need to police scientific misconduct because the very canons of science themselves preclude misbehavior and that the scientific enterprise is thus self-correcting. It is that expectation which the notoriety attached to “high profile” cases has challenged.

In May 1995, a federal court in Maryland awarded nearly $2 million in damages to a Cornell epidemiologist who charged that researchers at another institution had stolen her intellectual property by cribbing her research results—of which they had become aware during an early period of inter-institutional cooperative research—and incorporating them into a proposal forwarded to a funding agency without attribution as to source. However atypical or merely undetected such behavior may be, the significance of the case lay in the course which the aggrieved epidemiologist chose to pursue by opting not to invoke the mechanisms for monitoring scientific misconduct that operated within ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• title
• copy
• contents
• preface
• ack
• 1 Deception, Fraud, and Fallible Judgment
• 2 The Fading Myth of the Noble Scientist
• 3 The Role of the Social Sciences in the Analysis of Research Misconduct
• Part II Advocacy Scholarship and the Refraction of Truth
• 4 Miscounting Social Ills
• 5 Investigating Sexual Coercion
• 6 The Myth of a “Stolen Legacy”
• 7 On Self-Suppression
• 8 The Egalitarian Fiction
• Part III Attribution and Misattribution of Deception
• 9 Making Monsters
• 10 Incest, Freud, and Fraud
• 11 Cyril Burt: Fallible Judgments about Deception
• 12 Cyril Burt as the Victim of Scientific Hoax
• 13 Benevolent Misdiagnosis: Fraud by Euphemism in the Mental Health Professions
• Contributors
• index