Oh Good Grief!
As if the field of psychology did not have enough scandal and fakery already.
A childish spat between academics at Rutgers and infantile behaviour by Robert Trivers, a Professor of Anthropology who ought to know better. His opponent is William Brown, now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire. But in this infantile academic spat it does seem as if the “establishment” are circling the wagons. I suspect that Robert Trivers, and Nature and other psychology heavyweights will prevail — but only to the further discredit of the discipline and its narcissistic “star performers”.
Can’t they just both be spanked — in public? or put in the stocks?
A study featured in Nature in 2005 has drawn suspicion from university officials and one of its authors.
Few researchers have tried harder than Robert Trivers to retract one of their own papers. In 2005, Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, published an attention-grabbing finding: Jamaican teenagers with a high degree of body symmetry were more likely to be rated ‘good dancers’ by their peers than were those with less symmetrical bodies. The study, which suggested that dancing is a signal for sexual selection in humans, was featured on the cover of this journal (W. M. Brown et al. Nature 438, 1148–1150; 2005).
But two years later, Trivers began to suspect that the study data had been faked by one of his co-authors, William Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at the time. In seeking a retraction, Trivers self-published The Anatomy of a Fraud, a small book detailing what he saw as evidence of data fabrication. Later, Trivers had a verbal altercation over the matter with a close colleague and was temporarily banned from campus.
An investigation of the case, completed by Rutgers and released publicly last month, now seems to validate Trivers’ allegations. Brown disputes the university’s finding, but it could help to clear the controversy that has clouded Trivers’ reputation as the author of several pioneering papers in the 1970s. For example, Trivers advanced an influential theory of ‘reciprocal altruism’, in which people behave unselfishly and hope that they will later be rewarded for their good deeds. He also analysed human sexuality in terms of the investments that mothers and fathers each make in child-rearing. ….
In 2008, Trivers sought to retract the paper, but found the editors at Nature reluctant to do so. The paper remains unretracted, although a spokeswoman for Nature says that the case is under “active consideration”. (Information available to Nature’s research-manuscript editors is not generally shared with its reporters.) ….
…. Last year, the investigation concluded that there was “clear and convincing” evidence of fabrication by Brown, who it alleged had altered overall asymmetry measures of dancers to support the notion that better dancers were more symmetrical. The report was not published for more than a year, at which point Trivers posted it online. Rutgers has sent a copy to the NSF’s inspector-general, who is reviewing it to determine what action, if any, to take. ……
Brown, now a psychologist at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, denies fabricating the data. He criticizes the Rutgers investigation for comparing his data set with the one from Trivers’ group rather than the original hard copies of the source data.
The k2p blog 