Measurement error in monkey studies

Following up on our recent discussion of combative linguist Noam Chomsky and disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser, here are some stories from Jay Livingston about monkey research.

Don’t get me wrong—I eat burgers, so I’m not trying to get on my moral high horse here. But the stories do get you thinking about measurement error and why I would not trust the PI of a monkey study to code his own measurements and keep his data secret.

2 thoughts on “Measurement error in monkey studies

  1. There’s a segment on Bloggingheads I often watch called “The Mind Report”. Reading this I remembered that one of the regulars, Laurie Santos, does research on monkeys. Googling to see if she’d expressed an opinion I found that Hauser was her advisor and they’d published papers together, but no statement came up immediately. Bloggingheads has another science themed series, “Science Saturday” with John Horgan & George Johnson, but nowhere on the site did I find anything about the Hauser scandal. Searching for statements by them elsewhere I find that Hauser once signed onto a letter to Horgan denouncing “Darkness at El Dorado” (which he was about to review), but nothing about Hauser’s fabrication. It surprised me, perhaps because of other sites I was reading where the Hauser story was a big thing everyone commented on.

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