Lads’ mags, sexism, and research in psychology: an interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty (part 2).

Posted on January 13, 2012January 13, 2012 by jstemwedel

In this post, I continue my interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty, a social psychologist at the University of Surrey and one of the authors of ” ‘Lights on at the end of the party’: Are lads’ mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?”, which was published in The British Journal of Psychology in December. My detailed discussion of that paper is here. The last post presented part 1 of our interview, in which Dr. Hegarty answered questions about the methodology of this particular research, as well as about some of the broader methodological differences between research in psychology and in sciences that are focused on objects of study other than humans.

Janet Stemwedel: It’s been pointed out that the university students that seem to be the most frequent subjects of psychological research are WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic). Is the WEIRDness of university students as subjects in this research something that should make us cautious about the strength of the conclusions we draw? Or are university students actually a reasonably appropriate subject pool from the point of view of exploring how lads’ mags work?

Peter Hegarty: According to the historian Kurt Danziger in his book Constructing the Subject, students became an unmarked “normative” subject population for psychologists, at least in the United States, between the world wars. Since then, criticisms of over-reliance on student samples have been common (such as those of Quin McNemar in the 1940s, or David Sears in the 1980s). Within the history of this criticism, perhaps what is most distinct about the recent argument about WIERDness is that it draws on the developments in cultural psychology of the last 20 years or so. For this specific study, our rational for studying young people on a campus was not only convenience; they are also the target market for these magazines, by virtue of their age, and by virtue of possessing the disposable income to purchase them.

May I take the time to offer a slightly broader perspective on the problem of under- and over-representation of social groups in psychology? The issue is not simply one of who gets included, and who does not. This is because groups can be disempowered and science compromised by being erased (as the WIERD criticism presumes), and groups can be disempowered when they are consistently located within the psychologists’ gaze – as in Foucaultian disciplinary power. African-Americans are oversampled in the US literature on forensic psychology, but that literature is not anti-racist, it’s largely based on a “deficit” model of race (Carter & Forsythe, 2007). The issue is not simply one of inclusion or exclusion, but one of how inclusion happens, as sociologist Steven Epstein’s work on inclusive paradigms in medicine nicely shows.

In other experiments and content analyses, my colleagues and I have found that people spontaneously explain group differences by attending to lower power groups more of the time. In our own research we have observed this pattern in scientists publications and in explanations produced in the lab with regard to race, gender, and sexuality, for example (Hegarty & Buechel, 2006; Hegarty & Pratto, 2004). On the face of it, this might lead to greater stereotyping of the lower power “marked” group. Indeed, as Suzanne Bruckmueller’s work on linguistic framing subtly shows, once a group is positioned as “the effect to be explained” in an account of group differences, then people tend to infer that the group has less power (Bruckmüller & Abele, 2010). Our work suggests that to trouble the “normative” status that WIERD people occupy in our ontologies, that inclusion is necessary but not sufficient. It’s also important to reframe our questions about difference to think concretely about normative groups. In the case of our lads’ mags research, we were heartened that people were prompted to reframe questions about the widespread problem of violence against women away from the small category of convicted rapists, to ask broader questions about how such violence is normalized.

JS: A lot of scientists seem to have a love/hate relationship with mass media. They want the public to understand their research and why it’s interesting and important, but media coverage sometimes gets the details badly wrong, or obliterates the nuance. And, given the subject matter of your research (which the average person might reasonably connect to his or her own concerns more easily than anything we might learn about the Higgs boson), it seems like misunderstandings of what the research means could get amplified pretty quickly. What has your experience been as far as the media coverage of your research? Are there particular kinds of issues you’d like the public to grasp better when they read or hear about this kind of research?

PH: Your question touches on the earlier point about the difference between the human and natural sciences. Our work is caught up in “looping effects” as people interpret it for themselves, but the Higgs boson doesn’t care if the folks in CERN discover it or not. (I think, I’m no expert on sub-atomic physics!) Although some research that I released last year on sexist language got good coverage in the media (Hegarty, Watson, Fletcher & McQueen, 2011), the speed and scale of the reaction to the Horvath et al. (2011) paper was a new experience for me, so I am learning about the media as I go.

There is no hard and fast boundary between “the media” and “the public” who are ‘influenced’ by that media anymore; I’m not sure there ever was one. The somewhat ‘viral’ reaction to this work on the social networking sites such as twitter was visibly self-correcting in ways that don’t fit with social scientists’ theories that blame the media for beguiling the public. Some journalists misunderstood the procedures of Experiment 1 in our study, and it was misdescribed in some media sources. But on Twitter, folk were re-directing those who were reproducing that factual error to the Surrey website. Overall, watching the Twitter feeds reminded me most of the experience of giving a class of students an article to discuss and watching a very useful conversation emerge about what the studies had hypothesized, what they had found, how much you might conclude from the results, and what the policy implications might be. I am somewhat more optimistic about the affordances of social media for education as a result of this experience.

JS: Given the connection between your research questions in this research and actual features of our world that might matter to us quite a lot (like how young men view and interact with the women with whom they share a world), it seems like ultimately we might want to *use* what we learn from the research to make things better, rather than just saying, “Huh, that’s interesting.” What are the challenges to moving from description to prescription here? Are there other “moving parts” of our social world you think we need to understand better to respond effectively to what we learn from studies like these?

Related to what I’ve said above, I would like people to see the research as a “red flag” about the range and character of media that young people now read, and which are considered “normal.” There are now numerous anecdotes on the web of people who have been prompted by this research to look at a lads’ mag for the first time – and been surprised or shocked by what they see. We are also in contact with some sex educators about how this work might be used to educate men for a world in which this range of media exists. Precisely because we think this research might have relevance for a broad range of people who care about the fact that people should have pleasure, intimacy, and sex without violence, bullying and hatred,

We have suggested that it should prompt investment in sex education rather than censorship. In so doing, we are adopting an ‘incrementalist’ approach to people’s intelligence about sex and sexual literacy. Carol Dweck’s work shows that children and young people who believe their intelligence to be a fixed ‘entity’ do not fare as well academically as those who believe their intelligence might be something ‘incremental’ that can be changed through effort. Censorship approaches seem to us to be based on fear, and to assume a rather fixed limit to the possibilities of public discourse about sex. We do not make those assumptions, but we fear that they can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

JS: How do you keep your prescriptive hunches from creeping into the descriptive project you’re trying to do with your research?

I’m not sure that it is possible or desirable to exclude subjectivity from science; your last question obliged me to move from description to prescription. It is sometimes striking how much many scientists want to be ‘above politics’ and influence policy, to advocate and remain value-neutral, to change the world, but not to intervene etc. My thinking on this matter borrows more from Sandra Harding’s view of ‘strong objectivity,’ and particularly her idea that the science we get is affected by the range of people included in its production and the forms of social relationships in which they participate. I also think that Stephen Shapin’s book A Social History of Truth is a useful albeit distal explanation of why the question of subjectivity in science is often seen as an affront to honour and the opposite of reasoned dispassionate discussion. In the UK, there is now an obligation on scientists to engage non-academic publics by reporting’ impact summaries to the government as part of national exercises for documenting research excellence. However, this policy can overlook the importance of two-way dialogue between academic and non-academic audiences about how we create different kinds of knowledge for different kinds of purposes. For those reasons, I’m grateful for the opportunity to participate in a more dialogical forum about science and ethics like this one.

Bibliography

Bruckmüller, S., & Abele, A. (2010). Comparison focus in intergroup comparisons: Who we compare to whom influences who we see as powerful and agentic. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 1424-1435.

Carter, R.T., & Forsythe, J.M. (2007). Examining race and culture in psychology journals: The case of forensic psychology. Professional Psychology: Theory and Practice, 38, 133-142.

Danziger, K. (1990). Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Dweck, C. (2000). Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality and Development. Psychology Press.

Epstein, S. (2007). Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research. Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press.

Foucault, M. (1978). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York, Random House.

Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. In Dan Sperber, David Premack and Ann James Premack (Eds.), Causal Cognition: A Multi-Disciplinary Debate (pp. 351-383). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Harding, S. (1987). The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Hegarty, P., & Buechel C. (2006). Androcentric reporting of gender differences in APA journals: 1965-2004. Review of General Psychology, 10, 377-389.

Hegarty, P, & Pratto F. (2004) The differences that norms make: Empiricism, social constructionism, and the interpretation of group differences. Sex Roles, 50, 445-453.

Hegarty P.J., Watson, N., Fletcher L, & McQueen, G. (2011) When gentlemen are first and ladies are last: Effects of gender stereotypes on the order of romantic partners’ names. British Journal of Social Psychology, 50, 21-35.

Horvath, M.A.H., Hegarty, P., Tyler, S. & Mansfield, S. (2011).“Lights on at the end of the party”: Are Lads Mags’ Mainstreaming Dangerous Sexism? British Journal of Psychology. Available from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02086.x/abstract

McNemar, Q. (1940). Sampling in psychological research. Psychological Bulletin, 37, 331-365.

Sears, D. O. (1986). College sophomores in the laboratory: Influences of a narrow data base on social psychology’s view of human nature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 515-530.

Shapin, S. (1994). A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lads’ mags, sexism, and research in psychology: an interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty (part 1).

Posted on January 12, 2012January 12, 2012 by jstemwedel

Back in December, there was a study that appeared in The British Journal of Psychology that got a fair amount of buzz. The paper (Horvath, M.A.H., Hegarty, P., Tyler, S. & Mansfield, S., ” ‘Lights on at the end of the party’: Are lads’ mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?” British Journal of Psychology. DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02086.x) looked the influence that magazines aimed at young men (“lads’ mags”) might have on how the young people who read them perceive their social reality. Among other things, the researchers found that the subjects in the study found the descriptions of women given by convicted sex offenders and lads’ mags are well nigh indistinguishable, and that when a quote was identified as from a lads’ mag (no matter what its actual source), subjects were more likely to say that they identified with the view it expressed than if the same quote was identified as coming from a rapist.

I wrote about the details of this research in a post on my other blog.

One of the authors of the study, Dr. Peter Hegarty, is someone I know a little from graduate school (as we were in an anthropology of science seminar together one term). He was gracious enough to agree to an interview about this research, and to answer some of my broader questions (as a physical scientist turned philosopher) about what doing good science looks like to a psychologist. Owing to its length, I’m presenting the interview in two posts, this one and one that will follow it tomorrow.

Janet Stemwedel: Is there something specific that prompted this piece of research — a particular event, or the Nth repetition of a piece of “common wisdom” that made it seem like it was time to interrogate it? Or is this research best understood as part of a broader project (perhaps of identifying pieces of our social world that shape our beliefs and attitudes)?

Peter Hegarty: We came to this research for different reasons. Miranda [Horvath] had been working more consistently on the role of lads’ mags in popular culture than I had been (see Coy & Horvath, 2011). Prompted by another students’ interests, I had published a very short piece earlier this year on the question of representations of ‘heteroflexible’ women in lads’ mags (Hegarty & Buechel, 2011). The two studies reported in Horvath, Hegarty, Tyler & Mansfield (2011) were conducted as Suzannah Tyler and Sophie Mansfield’s M.Sc. Dissertations in Forensic Psychology, a course provided jointly by the University of Surrey and Broadmoor Hospital. Miranda and I took the lead on writing up the research after Miranda moved to Middlesex University in 2010.

JS: When this study was reported in the news, as the Twitters were lighting up with discussion about this research, some expressed concern that the point of the research was to identify lads’ mags as particularly bad (compared to other types of media), or as actually contributing to rapes. Working from the information in the press release (because the research paper wasn’t quite out yet), there seemed to be some unclarity about precisely what inferences were being drawn from the results and (on the basis of what inferences people thought you *might* be drawing) about whether the research included appropriate controls — for example, quotes about women from The Guardian, or from ordinary-men-who-are-not-rapists. Can you set us straight on what the research was trying to find out and on what inferences it does or does not support? And, in light of the hypotheses you were actually testing, can you discuss the issue of experimental controls?

PH: Our research was focused on lads’ mags –- rather than other media –- because content analysis research had shown that those magazines were routinely sexist, operated in an advice-giving mode, and often dismissed their social influence. This is not the case –- as far as I know — with regard to The Guardian. So there was a rationale to focus on lads’ mags that was not based on prior research. We hoped to test our hypothesis that lads’ mags might be normalizing hostile sexism. This idea hung on two matters; is there an overlap in the discourse of lads’ mags and something that most people would accept as hostile sexism? Does that content appear more acceptable to young men when it appears to come from a lads’ mag? The two studies mapped onto these goals. In one, we found that young women and men couldn’t detect the source of a quote as coming from a convicted rapist’s interview or a lads’ mag. In another, young men identified more with quotes that they believed to have come from lads’ mags rather than convicted rapists.

JS: While we’re on the subject of controls, it strikes me that good experimental design in psychological research is probably different in some interesting ways from good experimental design in, say, chemistry. What are some misconceptions those of us who have more familiarity with the so-called “hard sciences” have about social science research? What kind of experimental rigor can you achieve without abandoning questions about actual humans-in-the-world?

PH: You are right that these sciences might have different ontologies, because psychology is a human science. There are a variety of perspectives on this, with scholars such as Ian Hacking arguing for a separate ontology of the human sciences and more postmodern authors such as Bruno Latour arguing against distinctions between humans and things. Generally, I would be loath do describe differences between the sciences in terms of the metaphor of “hardness,” because the term is loaded with implicature. First, psychology is a potentially reflexive science about people, conducted by people and is characterized by what the philosopher Ian Hacking calls “looping effects;” people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours are themselves influenced by psychological theories about them. Second, measurement in psychology is more often dependent on normalization and relative judgment (as in an IQ test, or a 7-point Likert item on a questionnaire, for example). Third, there is a lot of validity to the Foucaultian argument that the “psy- disciplines” have often been used in the service of the state, to divide people into categories of “normal” and “abnormal” people, so that different people might be treated very differently without offending egalitarian ideologies. Much of clinical psychology and testing takes this form.

Critics of psychology often stop there. By so doing, they overlook the rich tradition within psychology of generating knowledge that troubles forms of normalization, by suggesting that the distinction between the “normal” and the “abnormal” is not as firm as common sense suggests. Studies in this tradition might include Evelyn Hooker’s (1957) demonstration – from that dark era when homosexuality was considered a mental illness – that there are no differences in the responses of gay and straight men to personality tests. One might also include David Rosenhan’s (1973) study in which ordinary people managed to deceive psychiatrists that they were schizophrenic. A third example might be stereotype threat research (e.g., by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, 1995), which shows that the underperformance of African Americans on some standardized tests reflects not genuine ability, but a situational constraint introduced by testing conditions. Like these studies, we would hope ours would trouble’s people’s sense of what they take for granted about differences between people. In particular we hope that people will reconsider what they think they know about “extreme” sexism – that leads to incarceration – and “normal” sexism, that is now typical for young men to consume. I would urge academic critics of psychology – particularly those that focus on its complicity with Foucaultian disciplinary power, and the power of the state more generally – to develop more critiques that can account for such empirical work.

For the last half a century, “rigor” in empirical psychology has been organized by the language of validity and reliability of measurement (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). Psychologists also tend to be Popperians, who construct “falsifiable” theories and use Fischerian inferential statistics to construct experiments that afford the possibility of falsification. However, inferential norms are changing in the discipline for three reasons. First, the rise of neuroscience has lead to a more inductive form of inference in which mapping and localization plays a greater role in scientific explanation. Second, social psychologists are increasingly engaging with structural equation modelling and offering confirmatory models of social processes. Third, there is “statistical reform” in psychology, away from the ritual of statistical significance testing toward making variability more transparent through the reporting of confidence intervals, effect sizes, and exact significance values. See Spellman (2012) for one very recent discussion of what’s happening within the genre of scientific writing in psychology around retaining rigor and realism in psychological science.

JS: One thing that struck me in reading the paper was that instruments have been developed to measure levels of sexism. Are these measures well-accepted within the community of research psychologists? (I am guessing that if the public even knew about them, they would be pretty controversial in some quarters … maybe the very quarters whose denizens would get high scores on these measures!)

We used two well-established measures; the ambivalent sexism inventory and the AMMSA, and one measure of endorsement of lads’ mags that we developed ourselves for the study. We describe some of the previous findings of other researchers who have used these scales to examine individual differences in responses to vignettes about sexual violence in the article. We feel more confident of the measure we developed ourselves because it was highly correlated with all other measures of sexism and because it was highly correlated with men’s identification with quotes from rapists and from lads’ mags. In other words, we followed the logic of psychologists such as Lee Cronbach, Paul Meehl and Donald Campbell for establishing and developing the “construct validity” of the empirical scales.

* * * * *

Tomorrow, in the second part of my interview with Peter Hegarty, we discuss the WEIRD-ness of college students as subjects for psychological research, how to go from description to prescription, and what it’s like for scientists to talk about their research with the media in the age of Twitter. Stay tuned!

Bibliography

Cronbach, L. J., & Meehl, P. E. (1955). Construct validity in psychological tests. Psychological Bulletin, 52, 281-302.

Coy, M., & Horvath, M.A.H. (2011).‘Lads mags’, young men’s attitudes towards women and acceptance of myths about sexual aggression. Feminism & Psychology, 21, 144-150.

Foucault, M. (1978). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York, Random House.

Hegarty, P., & Buechel C (2011) ‘”What Blokes Want Lesbians to be”: On FHM and the socialization of pro-lesbian attitudes among heterosexual-identified men’. Sage Publications Feminism & Psychology, 21, 240-247.

Hooker, E. (1957). The adjustment of the male overt homosexual. Journal of Projective Techniques, 21, 18-31.

Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rosenhan, D.L. (1973). On being sane in insane places. Science, 179, 250-258.

Spellman, B.A. (2012). Introduction to the special section: Data, data everywhere. . . especially in my file drawer. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 58-59.

Steele, C., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, 797-811.

Scientific authorship: guests, courtesy, contributions, and harms.

Posted on November 4, 2011November 4, 2011 by jstemwedel

DrugMonkey asks, where’s the harm in adding a “courtesy author” (also known as a “guest author”) to the author line of a scientific paper?

I think this question has interesting ethical dimensions, but before we get into those, we need to say a little bit about what’s going on with authorship of scientific papers.

I suppose there are possible worlds in which who is responsible for what in a scientific paper might not matter. In the world we live in now, however, it’s useful to know who designed the experimental apparatus and got the reaction to work (so you can email that person your questions when you want to set up a similar system), who did the data analysis (so you can share your concerns about the methodology), who made the figures (so you can raise concerns about digital fudging of the images), etc. Part of the reason people put their names on scientific papers is so we know who stands behind the research — who is willing to stake their reputation on it.

The other reason people put their names on scientific papers is to claim credit for their hard work and their insights, their contribution to the larger project of scientific knowledge-building. If you made a contribution, the scientific community ought to know about it so they can give you props (and funding, and tenure, and the occasional Nobel Prize).

But, we aren’t in a possition to make accurate assignments of credit or responsibility if we have no good information about what an author’s actual involvement in the project may have been. We don’t know who’s really in a position to vouch for the data, or who really did heavy intellectual lifting in bringing the project to fruition. We may understand, literally, the claim, “Joe Schmoe is second author of this paper,” but we don’t know what that means, exactly.

I should note that there is not one universally recognized authorship standard for all of the Tribe of Science. Rather, different scientific disciplines (and subdisciplines) have different practices as far as what kind of contribution is recognized as worthy of inclusion as an author on a paper, and as far as what the order in which the authors are listed is supposed to communicate about the magnitude of each contribution. In some fields, authors are always listed alphabetically, no matter what they contributed. In others, being first in the list means you made the biggest contribution, followed by the second author (who made the second-biggest contribution), and so forth. It is usually the case that the principal investigator (PI) is identified as the “corresponding author” (i.e., the person to whom questions about the work should be directed), and often (but not always) the PI takes the last slot in the author line. Sometimes this is an acknowledgement that while the PI is the brains of the lab’s scientific empire, particular underlings made more immediately important intellectual contributions to the particular piece of research the paper is communicating. But authorship practices can be surprisingly local. Not only do different fields do it differently, but different research groups in the same field — at the same university — do it differently. What this means is it’s not obvious at all, from the fact that your name appears as one of the authors of a paper, what your contribution to the project was.

There have been attempts to nail down explicit standards for what kinds of contributions should count for authorship, with the ICMJE definition of authorship being one widely cited effort in this direction. Not everyone in the Tribe of Science, or even in the subset of the tribe that publishes in biomedical journals, thinks this definition draws the lines in the right places, but the fact that journal editors grapple with formulating such standards suggests at least the perception that scientists need a clear way to figure out who is responsible for the scientific work in the literature. We can have a discussion about how to make that clearer, but we have to acknowledge that at the present moment, just noting that someone is an author without some definition of what that entails doesn’t do the job.

Here’s where the issue of “guest authorship” comes up. A “guest author” is someone whose name appears in a scientific paper’s author line even though she has not made a contribution that is enough (under whatever set of standards one recognizes for proper authorship) to qualify her as an author of the paper.

A guest is someone who is visiting. She doesn’t really live here, but stays because of the courtesy and forebearance of the host. She eats your food, sleeps under your roof, uses your hot water, watches your TV — in short, she avails herself of the amenities the host provides. She doesn’t pay the rent or the water bill, though; that would transform her from a guest to a tenant.

To my way of thinking, a guest author is someone who is “just visiting” the project being written up. Rather than doing the heavy lifting in that project, she is availing herself of the amenities offered by association (in print) with that project, and doing so because of the courtesy and forebearance of the “host” author.

The people who are actually a part of the project will generally be able to recognize the guest author as a “guest” (as opposed to an actual participant). The people receiving the manuscript will not. In other words, the main amenity the guest author partakes in is credit for the labors of the actual participants. Even if all the participants agreed to this (and didn’t feel the least bit put out at the free-rider whose “authorship” might be diluting his or her own share of credit), this makes it impossible for those outside the group to determine what the guest author’s actual contribution was (or, in this case, was not). Indeed, if people outside the arrangement could tell that the guest author was a free-rider, there wouldn’t be any point in guest authorship.

Science strives to be a fact-based enterprise. Truthful communication is essential, and the ability to connect bits of knowledge to the people who contributed is part of how the community does quality control on that knowledge base. Ambiguity about who made the knowledge may lead to ambiguity about what we know. Also, developing too casual a relationship with the truth seems like a dangerous habit for a scientist to get into.

Coming back to DrugMonkey’s question about whether courtesy authorship is a problem, it looks to me like maybe we can draw a line between two kinds of “guests,” one that contributes nothing at all to the actual design, execution, evaluation, or communication of the research, and one who contributes something here, just less than what the conventions require for proper authorship. If these characters were listed as authors on a paper, I’d be inclined to call the first one a “guest author” and the second a “courtesy author” in an attempt to keep them straight; the cases with which DrugMonkey seems most concerned are the “courtesy authors” in my taxonomy. In actual usage, however, the two labels seem to be more or less interchangeable. Naturally, this makes it harder to distinguish who actually did what — but it strikes me that this is just the kind of ambiguity people are counting on when they include a “guest author” or “courtesy author” in the first place.

What’s the harm?

Consider a case where the PI of a research group insists on giving authorship of a paper to a postdoc who hasn’t gotten his experimental system to work at all and is almost out of funding. The PI gives the justification that “He needs some first-author papers or his time here will have been a total waste.” As it happens, giving this postdoc authorship bumps the graduate student who did all the experimental work (and the conceptual work, and data analysis, and drafting of the manuscript) out of first author slot — maybe even off the paper entirely.

There is real harm here, to multiple parties. In this case, someone got robbed of appropriate credit, and the person identified as most responsible for the published work will be a not-very-useful person to contact with deeper questions about the work (since he didn’t do any of it or at best participated on the periphery of the project).

Consider another kind of case, where authorship is given to a well-known scientist with a lot of credibility in his field, but who didn’t make a significant intellectual contribution to work (at least, not one that rises to the level of meriting authorship under the recognized standards). This is the kind of courtesy authorship that was extended to Gerald Schatten in a 2005 paper in Science another of whose authors was Hwang Woo Suk. This paper had 25 authors listed, with Schatten identified as the senior author. Ultimately, the paper was revealed to be fraudulent, at which point Schatten claimed mostly to have participated in writing the paper in good English — a contribution recognized as less than what one would expect from an author (especially the senior author).

Here, including Schatten as an author seemed calculated to give the appearance (to the journal editors while considering the manuscript, and to the larger scientific community consuming the published work)that the work was more important and/or credible, because of the big name associated with it. But this would only work because listing that big name in the author line amounts to claiming the big name was actually involved in the work. When the paper fell apart, Schatten swiftly disavowed responsibility — but such a disavowal was only necessary because of what was communicated by the author line, and I think it’s naïve to imagine that this “ambiguity” or “miscommunication” was accidental.

In cases like this, I think it’s fair to say courtesy authorship does harm, undermining the baseline of trust in the scientific community. It’s hard to engage in efficient knowledge-building with people you think are trying to put one over on you.

The cases where DrugMonkey suggests courtesy authorship might be innocuous strike me as interestingly different. They are cases where someone has actually made a real contribution of some sort to the work, but where that contribution may be judged (under whatever you take to be the accepted standards of your scientific discipline) as not quite rising to the level of authorship. Here, courtesy authorship could be viewed as inflating the value of the actual contribution (by listing the person who made it in the author line, rather than the acknowledgements), or alternatively as challenging where the accepted standards of your discipline draw the line between a contribution that qualifies you as an author and one that does not. For example, DrugMonkey writes:

First, the exclusion of those who “merely” collect data is stupid to me. I’m not going to go into the chapter and verse but in my lab, anyway, there is a LOT of ongoing trouble shooting and refining of the methods in any study. It is very rare that I would have a paper’s worth of data generated by my techs or trainees and that they would have zero intellectual contribution. Given this, the asymmetry in the BMJ position is unfair. In essence it permits a lab head to be an author using data which s/he did not collect and maybe could not collect but excludes the technician who didn’t happen to contribute to the drafting of the manuscript. That doesn’t make sense to me. The paper wouldn’t have happened without both of the contributions.

I agree with DrugMonkey that there’s often a serious intellectual contribution involved in conducting the experiments, not just in designing them (and that without the data, all we have are interesting hunches, not actual scientific knowledge, to report). Existing authorship standards like those from ICMJE or BMJ can unfairly exclude those who do the experimental labor from authorship by failing to recognize this as an intellectual contribution. Pushing to have these real contributions recognized with appropriate career credit is important. As well, being explicit about who made these contributions to the research being reported in the paper makes it much easier for other scientists following up on the published work (e.g., comparing it to their own results in related experiments, or trying to use some of the techniques described in the paper to set up new experiments) to actually get in touch with the people most likely to be able to answer their questions.

Changing how might weight experimental prowess is given in the career scorekeeping may be an uphill battle, especially when the folks distributing the rewards for the top scores are administrators (focused on the money the people they’re scoring can bring to an institution) and PIs (who frequently have more working hours devoted to conception and design of project for their underlings rather than to the intellectual labor of making those projects work, and to writing the proposals that bring in the grant money and the manuscripts that report the happy conclusion of the projects funded by such grants). That doesn’t mean it’s not a fight worth having.

But, I worry that using courtesy authorship as a way around this unfair setting of the authorship bar actually amounts to avoiding the fight rather than addressing these issues and changing accepted practices.

DrugMonkey also writes:

Assuming that we are not talking about pushing someone else meaningfully* out of deserved credit, where lies the harm even if it is a total gift?

Who is hurt? How are they damaged?
__ *by pushing them off the paper entirely or out of first-author or last-author position. Adding a 7th in the middle of the authorship list doesn’t affect jack squat folks.

Here, I wonder: if dropping in a courtesy author as the seventh author of a paper can’t hurt, how either can we expect it to help the person to whom this “courtesy” is extended?

Is it the case that no one actually expects that the seventh author made anything like a significant contribution, so no one is being misled in judging the guest in the number seven slot as having made a comparable contribution to the scientist who earned her seventh-author position in another paper? If listing your seventh-author paper on your CV is automatically viewed as not contributing any points in your career scorekeeping, why even list it? And why doesn’t it count for anything? Is it because the seventh author never makes a contribution worth career points … or is it because, for all we know, the seventh author may be a courtesy author, there for other reasons entirely?

If a seventh-author paper is actually meaningless for career credit, wouldn’t it be more help to the person to whom you might extend such a “courtesy” if you actually engaged her in the project in such a way that she could make an intellectual contribution recognized as worthy of career credit?

In other words, maybe the real problem with such courtesy authorship is that it gives the appearance of help without actually being helpful.