Academics Use Imaginary Data in Their Research
After surviving a disastrous congressional hearing, Claudine Gay was forced to resign as the president of Harvard for repeatedly copying and pasting language used by other scholars and passing it off as her own. She’s hardly alone among elite academics, and plagiarism has become a roiling scandal in academia.
There’s another common practice among professional researchers that should be generating even more outrage: making up data. I’m not talking about explicit fraud, which also happens way too often, but about openly inserting fictional data into a supposedly objective analysis.
Instead of doing the hard work of gathering data to test hypotheses, researchers take the easy path of generating numbers to support their preconceptions or to claim statistical significance. They cloak this practice in fancy-sounding words like “imputation,” “ecological inference,” “contextualization,” and “synthetic control.”
They’re actually just making stuff up.
Claudine Gay was accused of plagiarizing sections of her Ph.D. thesis, for which she was awarded Harvard’s Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in political science. She has since requested three corrections. More outrageous is that she wrote a paper on white voter participation without having any data on white voter participation.
In an article in the American Political Science Review that was based on her dissertation, Gay set out to investigate “the link between black congressional representation and political engagement,” finding that “the election of blacks to Congress negatively affects white political involvement and only rarely increases political engagement among African Americans.”
To arrive at that finding, you might assume that Gay had done the hard work of measuring white and black voting patterns in the districts she was studying. You would assume wrong.
Instead, Gay used regression analysis to estimate white voting patterns. She analyzed 10 districts with black representatives and observed that those with more voting-age whites had lower turnout at the polls than her model predicted. So she concludes that whites must be the ones not voting.
She committed what in statistics is known as the “ecological fallacy”—you see two things occurring in the same place and assume a causal relationship. For example, you notice a lot of people dying in hospitals, so you assume hospitals kill people. The classic example is Jim Crow laws were strictest in states that skewed black. Ecological inference leads to the false conclusion that blacks supported Jim Crow.
Gay’s theory that a black congressional representative depresses white voter turnout could be true, but there are other plausible explanations for what she observed. The point is that we don’t know. The way to investigate white voter turnout is to measure white voter turnout.Â
Gay is hardly the only culprit. Because she was the president of Harvard, it’s worth making an example of her work, but it reflects broad trends in academia. Unlike the academic crime of plagiarism, students are taught and encouraged to invent data under the guise of statistical sophistication. Academia values the appearance of truth over actual truth.
You need real data to understand the world. The process of gathering real data also leads to essential insights. Researchers pick up on subtleties that often cause them to shift their hypotheses. Armchair investigators, on the other hand, build neat rows and columns that don’t say anything about what’s happening outside their windows.
Another technique for generating rather than collecting data is called “imputation,” which was used in a paper titled “Green innovations and patents in OE
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