Social science’s house is on fire, and top guns don’t seem to notice, Part II

Here’s the outstandingly deficient response to recent revelations of widespread social science fraud from the executive director of the Association for Psychological Science:

Such egregious cases are rare, and they are harmful to the scientific enterprise. But it’s important that they be recognized as the aberrations they are. Science is not immune to lying and cheating, any more than are banking, medicine, or the law. It is also worth noting that Stapel was caught. True, he did get away with his intellectual crimes for far too long, embarrassingly so, but in the end it was the suspicions of his colleagues and students that exposed him. Scientific inquiry is guided by laboratory conventions and publishing rules that promote integrity and minimize the publication of false conclusions. This is equally true of all the sciences, just as it is true that all the sciences have been vexed by scoundrels.

 - Alan Kraut, “Despite Occasional Scandals, Science Can Police Itself,” Chronicle of Higher Education , December 3, 2011

(This post started out as “Is social psychology reformable? Part II,” but readers will see why the title got changed.)

As anyone who has read Part I will realize, Kraut’s remarks are mere reassurances. The problems that came to light recently during the Stapel case are not an aberration; they were, and are, inveterate, and they represent the current state of the discipline as a whole.

Students exposed these problems, just as assistants exposed similar problems at ex-Harvard professor Marc Hauser’s lab (which came up with stunning revelations that, despite all appearances to the contrary, monkeys think like people).

Students and assistants have little to lose by rocking the boat in an extreme case because, at worst, it is far better to lose one’s PhD or position anonymously than in a scandal where one’s name might come up in a public report—and then be dredged up later by the competition, just when one is rising satisfactorily in another career.

But when a given level of professional misconduct is very widespread, as we saw in Part I, there just isn’t any such insider group with nothing to lose by blowing the whistle. That is why the problems tend to persist. It is thus useful to ask whom Mr. Kraut meant to reassure in his article, but let us come back to that in a moment.

We also learn from him that

1. “… what’s important is that the system is constantly under scrutiny by scientists themselves, who use the tools of science to expose and correct its flaws.” Actually, no system should be entirely in charge of scrutinizing itself. That’s like trying to look into and out of a window at the same time! Science has no special tools that enable an inherently impossible feat. Outside scrutiny, however unwelcome, is critical to maintaining competence, never mind excellence.

2. Papers in the works take the field to task for “some common but questionable research practices,” that were “used in the nation’s most elite labs more commonly than has been previously acknowledged.” Which amounts to saying that the problems were indefinitely ignored even in centers of excellence, but will now at least be discussed.

We can commend Mr. Kraut for taking the problems seriously enough to acknowledge them. But then, strangely, he says of the study authors critiquing the discipline’s methods,

The scientists who conducted these two time-consuming studies of scientific methodology took time away from their own research projects because they felt it was important to put laboratory science itself under the lens—with hopes of improving its integrity and value.

Well yes, Mr. Kraut. But the way you put that implies that you do not acknowledge that social science’s house is on fire.

Reader, if your house was on fire, wouldn’t you interrupt your kitchen reno to deal with it? Would you consider yourself worthy of praise for seeing that if the house perishes, so will the kitchen? The big question isn’t whether these researchers will publish some papers somewhere but whether anything meaningful will come of them. Won’t we be here in ten years, after another ten years’ research?

Who will the article  reassure? Those who hope no big changes will occur. For one thing, it is littered with appeals to authorities that have persistently failed in the past.

Should you go into social sciences? We’ve told you the worst. That doesn’t mean no one could do any good there.

Once, an American social scientist abroad, Edward Banfield, helped many of us understand more clearly why one part of a given country caught up to post-World War II industrial development swiftly but another part of the same country stagnated. In the stagnating area, he identified “amoral familism” as a culprit: the belief that helping one’s own family is the paramount virtue. As a result, most thieves of the public funds needed for new industrial infrastructure honestly did not see their actions as a vice or crime.

A classical philosopher would say that they were deficient in the key virtues of prudence (realism) and justice (realizing that we are not more important than others). If that did not change, nothing else would.

Banfield was much maligned in his day, of course, and there is a lesson in his fate: Go into social sciences only if you have—or, should you discover it, are willing to run with—a genuine insight into chronic human problems that helps everyone evaluate proposed solutions. And damn the torpedoes, because you will field many, especially from much-published investigators whose work is of little value.