Marc Hauser

In his resignation, Hauser stated that he had "some exciting opportunities in the private sector" involving education for high-risk teenagers, but that he might go back to academia "in the years to come." As of May 2013, Hauser's LinkedIn profile listed him as a co-founder of the website Gamience, claiming "Scientifically-based games that address global health problems of self-control."

In September 2012, after conducting a separate investigation, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found Hauser guilty of scientific misconduct. They concluded that Hauser had fabricated data in one study, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and incorrectly described how studies were conducted. The ORI barred Hauser from certain types of research and required that other research be conducted under supervision. They published a notice stating:

In 2007, Harvard University announced an internal investigation of alleged scientific misconduct by Hauser. In August 2010, the investigators found him solely responsible for eight counts of misconduct, and he took a year's leave of absence. In July 2011, Hauser resigned his faculty position at Harvard, effective August 1, 2011.

In two additional published papers, some field notes or video recordings were "incomplete", although Hauser and his co-author replicated the experiments. The Proceedings of the Royal Society published the replication of the missing data in an addendum to one of the papers. In April 2011 Hauser and Justin Wood (coauthor of the original paper) replicated the results of the 2007 Science study and published them—as an addendum—in the journal.

In 2010, Harvard found him guilty of scientific misconduct, and a year later he resigned. Because his research was financed by government grants, the Office of Research Integrity of the Health and Human Services Department also investigated, finding in 2012 that Hauser had fabricated data, manipulated experimental results, and published falsified findings.

The details of this investigation were not publicly released, and the lack of transparency evoked substantial speculation. Writing in the New York Times in August 2010, Nicholas Wade summarized:

On August 20, 2010, Michael Smith, Dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, released a statement confirming that an internal investigation had found Hauser guilty of eight counts of scientific misconduct. Three counts involved published papers, and five involved unpublished studies. The statement said that Harvard was cooperating with further investigations by the US Office of Research Integrity, the National Science Foundation Office of Inspector General, and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. They stated that they would conduct their own review and make their conclusions available to the public.

In August 2010, after the initial allegations came out, various publications published other accusations and speculations about Hauser's research, often citing reports by his former students and research assistants.

Although Hauser took a year-long leave of absence from Harvard in 2010, he was at first still planning to teach at the Harvard Extension School, which generated further controversy. On September 1, 2010, his classes at the Extension School were canceled. In April 2011, he was barred from teaching in the Psychology department or any other Arts and Sciences department.

A 2002 paper published in the journal Cognition was retracted. In this paper, Hauser and his collaborators concluded that cotton-top tamarin monkeys could learn simple rule-like patterns.

Hauser and a co-author published a reply to these criticisms, clarifying their coding criteria. However, in 2001 Hauser reported that his subsequent attempts to replicate the experiments were unsuccessful, observing no evidence for the previously claimed result.

In 1995, Hauser reported that cotton-top tamarins can recognize themselves in a mirror. Gordon G. Gallup questioned Hauser's findings, and reviewed some video recordings of Hauser's experiment, saying that "when I played the videotapes [for Hauser's experiments], there was not a thread of compelling evidence — scientific or otherwise — that any of the tamarins had learned to correctly decipher mirrored information about themselves. Upon requesting the remaining videotapes, Gallup was informed that the other tapes had been stolen. Together with Anderson, Gallup published a critical response to Hauser's article. Their criticism of Hauser's paper stated that the coding criteria were described in insufficient detail to code the monkeys' behavior and that, according to their assessment, the cotton-top tamarins did not show the behavior that they considered as evidence for mirror recognition in chimpanzees or other great apes.

Marc D. Hauser (born October 25, 1959) is an American evolutionary biologist and a researcher in primate behavior, animal cognition and human behavior found guilty of fabricated and falsified data. Hauser was a Harvard University professor from 1998 to 2011, when he resigned after being found guilty for research misconduct."