HEALTHY SKEPTICISM:
A professor's recipe for strengthening the body of research.
By Bill Kirtz
Science is based on fact, politics on opinion-right? Not according to a contrarian Northeastern psychology professor. Leon J. Kamin believes we'd be better off thinking of scientists as politicians in white coats.
A leading defender of the theory that environment, not heredity, determines intelligence, Kamin specializes in reanalyzing data that careless or biased researchers may have misinterpreted. "I ask questions it doesn't occur to them to ask, not because I'm smarter than them but because I have a different point of view," he says.
The trim sixty-nine-year-old is a veteran of The Bell Curve fray. In that incendiary 1994 best-seller, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray sparked debates on race relations, welfare reform, and social science by arguing that whites are inherently smarter than blacks. To Kamin, the controversy underscores his belief that science and politics can't be separated. If The Bell Curve is right in asserting that intelligence is fixed at birth-that there's a rigid and unbreakable caste system of brains-then such programs as Head Start are money-wasters. If you believe that success and failure lie in our genes, you may side with the authors' belief that affirmative action is "a poison leaking into American society."
If, however, you agree with Kamin that intelligence isn't inherited, you'll see investment in education for the disadvantaged as useful. You'll interpret rapid shifts in black students' test results as proof that compensatory programs can produce dramatic progress. You'll view attempts to identify genetic "markers" that predict criminal behavior as Nazi-style eugenics.
For decades, Kamin has been battling those who believe intelligence and violent tendencies are heritable. "Ideologically repulsed" by assertions that our genes determine unemployment as strongly as they do tooth decay, he started investigating the primary sources for those claims. The result, his 1974 collaboration with Richard Lewontin and Steven Rose on Not in Our Genes, debunked determinism and sociobiology. The Nation called it one of the most important books of the last two decades.
In his large, book-strewn Nightingale Hall office, whose adornments include an African National Congress flag and a Red Sox schedule, he talks briskly about challenge, boredom, and why experts get things wrong. He came here in 1987 largely to cut the travel time to his Parsonsville, Maine, retreat. Also, after nineteen years heading Princeton's psychology department, things had "become kind of boring. I knew exactly what every one of my colleagues would say in any situation. And I liked Northeastern's challenge, the history of the place, a working-class environment where there were no pampered children of the idle rich."
Kamin, who entered Harvard at sixteen, crammed two academic years into eighteen months, and then joined the Army to get GI Bill benefits, probably would score very high on any IQ test. But, believing in different types of intelligence-neural, experiential, and reflective-he calls IQ tests useless as even a crude measure of mental capability. Yet some researchers have used IQ scores and equally questionable measures to "prove" the inferiority of entire races. In the early 1900s, a compliant psychologist helped shut America's immigration gates to those considered lesser breeds by calculating that eighty percent of the Jews, Hungarians, and Italians landing at Ellis Island, and nearly ninety percent of the Russians, were "feeble-minded." Kamin demolishes that theory in The Bell Curve Debate, a 1995 paperback collection of documents and opinions on race, class, and intelligence.
More recent efforts to fix intelligence can be traced to policy arguments made during the Vietnam era, he says. There wasn't enough money to support both the war in Southeast Asia and the war on domestic poverty, so budget cutters justified elimination of social programs by citing theories that compensatory education had been tried and had failed. They argued that "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," he says. "Politicians make their decisions and then use psychologists and sociologists to support them, and they'll always find them. People will do research that will be funded."
What's the real nature-nurture story? Are we dealt our most important cards at birth? Kamin calls the question basically unanswerable. "Your conclusions are bound to be influenced by your biases." Only in science fiction, he says, can you separate interactions between genes and environment. "It's a very ambiguous field. Competent and honest people can take different positions." Even if intelligence is somehow heritable, that tells us nothing about how easy or hard it is to change, he says. "I inherited bad eyesight but I can buy glasses to improve it."
The lesson: beware of experts bearing findings. Kamin says you're bound to interpret data you collect in different and inevitably flawed field settings according to your theoretical bias. "I don't understand why scientists are treated with such kid gloves," he has said. "You're at the mercy of someone who goes burrowing in a used treasure trove of so-called facts that are lying around all over the place."
Kamin sees "fudging" as much more common than outright fakery among scientists, particularly academics. "People are aiming for glory, or just for tenure. You have to get published, and you don't get published by saying 'I did my best, but I couldn't prove anything.' The tenure rat race, the grant rat race puts pressure on scientists to produce results. You don't invent-you clean things up. If one of your eight lab rats isn't behaving the way you think it should, it's easy to delude yourself, to say, 'That damn rat must be sick,' and throw it out of the experiment." In Kamin's reviews of experiments and studies for methodological dishonesty, "If I look for something, I'll probably find it," he says.
When does fudging turn into deliberate slanting, then slide into fraud? It seems to be a slippery slope. Discovery, as a recent Science magazine editorial observes, "means recognizing something when you don't know what it looks like." It's only natural (in our genes?) to disregard information that doesn't fit our hypothesis and overrate facts that do. Sometimes, it's clear why scientists find what they do. A recent and widely publicized study concluding that abortion increases a woman's breast cancer risk by thirty percent was conducted by a biochemist who admits his research was politically motivated. His research is now being attacked as flawed.
Kamin's foes have called him "a darling of the militant left," and Kamin admits his own political agenda. "I absolutely have a predisposition, but I announce my theoretical bias up front. I'm checkable. I've deliberately not done any research; I analyze others' published data."
When he does spot fraud, Kamin attacks with vigor. He says eminent British psychologist Sir Cyril Burt, whose excesses he helped expose in Not in Our Genes, "clearly faked findings to influence policy in a sinister way." Such distortions and misrepresentations of data "constitute truly venomous racism." He has accused American psychology of lacking the courage "to call intolerably racist research by its proper name." He has charged those who pursue the theory that there are reliable genetic markers for violent behavior with being part of an "unbroken, fruitless, and reactionary tradition-part of a Full Employment for Social Scientists Act."
Kamin does more than name-call. In a variety of prominent academic and general-circulation publications, he regularly unearths selective use of results, number-juggling, flawed field settings, factual inconsistencies, and correlation parading as cause and effect. (More police in high crime areas, for example, doesn't mean police cause crime.)
Though he mentions retirement and has wearied of games deans play, Kamin shows no signs of fading away to Parsonsville. He's been doing a lot of traveling for his current project: a book on race, racism, and psychology in South Africa. "Psychologists were very active contributors to apartheid," he says. "They used their discipline in a transparently evil way to justify an absolutely horrific system." The primary architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, studied psychiatric genetics under German eugenics theorists who deemed blacks useful only for manual crafts. South Africa's segregation laws were inspired by Hitler's Racial Purity law. Verwoerd's "expertise" as a psychologist gave his politics of "separate development" and "separate freedoms" the veneer of professional authenticity.
In two years, Kamin hopes his work will be available for everyone to double-check. "I tell my students that if the research is important, don't depend on any secondary source, even me."
Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the School of Journalism. His opinions appear regularly in "Talk of the Gown."
