Overweight people are more dishonest, women with endometriosis are more attractive, and affirmative action needs to stop: Papers with these three conclusions have come under intense scrutiny on social media in recent days, with at least one retracted.
First up, a study — widely criticized for being sexist — which claimed to find that
Women with rectovaginal endometriosis were judged to be more attractive than those in the two control groups. Moreover, they had a leaner silhouette, larger breasts, and an earlier coitarche.
The study, called “Attractiveness of women with rectovaginal endometriosis: a case-control study” was published in 2013 in Fertility and Sterility, an Elsevier publication. It received sharp criticism on PubPeer beginning a year ago when one commenter, “Ovine Mastadenovirus,” wrote:
This paper is clear proof that sexism, racism, and sheer stupidity are alive and well in science.
The authors recently requested the retraction of the study after Shannon Headley, a medical student, wrote them (the email exchange, along with the request, appear on “Fertility & Sterility Dialog”) warning that in the wake of the #medbikini controversy, the work could produce a backlash.
Headley wrote in her first comment:
Although your methodology includes 4 independent female and male observers, I can foresee this article causing another outrage where women feel objectified or discriminated against and I wanted to bring this to your attention.
My hope is that the editors-in-chief and corresponding author will consider my feedback and make the best decision for your journal.
The first author, Paolo Vercellini of the Maggiore Policlinico Hospital in Milan, Italy, subsequently defended the work, claiming it was done methodically and with good intentions. Vercellini’s message ends with:
Despite the above consideration, when we understood that our article could have caused discontent, we abandoned completely this line of research. I am very sorry, but everything was done in good faith. We thought we had found another piece of evidence in favour of the genetic/intrauterine life theory.
I hope my words have clarified the context in which our idea was developed, and the theoretical premises underpinning our study. Rest assured that we take respect toward our patients very seriously.
Now, however, Vercellini and his co-authors are requesting that the paper be retracted:
The entire group of investigators contributing to the study entitled “Attractiveness of women with rectovaginal endometriosis: a case-control study” published in the January 2013 issue of Fertility and Sterility (1), requests to withdraw the article. We conducted the study in good faith and according to correct methodology. We believe that our findings have been partly misinterpreted, but at the same time realize that the article may have caused distress to some people. Women’s respect is a priority for us, and we are extremely sorry for the discontent the publication originated.
One surgeon rejoiced at the retraction, but noted it took seven years:
The Guardian was first to report on the retraction request. The paper is not yet marked retracted, however, and Elsevier has not responded to requests from Retraction Watch to clarify the article’s status.
Another paper, “Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019” was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) on March 24.
The article claimed to “provide an overview of policies that have been created to impact the racial and ethnic composition of the cardiology workforce” and asserts that affirmative action programs should be gradually abolished.
It goes on:
Long-term academic solutions and excellence should not be sacrificed for short-term demographic optics.
And later says:
Racial and ethnic preferences for undergraduate and medical school admissions should be gradually rolled back with a target end year of 2028…
The article was met with widespread scorn on Twitter, and on August 3, the journal tweeted:
Yesterday, the American Heart Association — which publishes JAHA — called the paper “wrong” in a statement:
[T]he American Heart Association (AHA) denounces the views expressed in the article and regrets its role in enabling those views to be promoted. Those views are a misrepresentation of the facts and are contrary to our organization’s core values and historic commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion in medicine and science.
It goes on:
We have launched a formal investigation to better understand how a paper that is completely incompatible with the Association’s core values was published. While the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) and the other AHA scientific journals are editorially independent of the Association, we take our responsibility to ensure factual accuracy seriously. The independent editors of JAHA and the American Heart Association are reviewing the journal’s peer-review and publication processes to ensure future submissions containing deliberate misinformation or misrepresentation are never published. The journal can and will do better.
The paper has now been retracted, over the objections of its author, Norman Wang of the University of Pittsburgh. Wang did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Retraction Watch. Neither the AHA statement nor the retraction notice elaborate on how the publication was able to pass through the review process.
The retraction notice reads:
For the article “Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019” by Norman C. Wang (1), the American Heart Association became aware of serious concerns after publication.The author’s institution, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), has notified the Editor‐in‐Chief that the article contains many misconceptions and misquotes and that together those inaccuracies, misstatements, and selective misreading of source materials strip the paper of its scientific validity.
JAHA will be publishing a detailed rebuttal. This retraction notice will be updated with a link to the rebuttal when it publishes.
The Editor‐in‐Chief deeply regrets publishing the article and offers his apologies. The American Heart Association and the Editor‐in‐Chief have determined that the best interest of the public and the research community will be served by issuing this notice of retraction.The author does not agree to the retraction.
The Editors and the American Heart Association retract the article from publication in Journal of the American Heart Association.
The episode is the second time within 18 months that an AHA journal has found itself linked to discriminatory views. In March 2019, the AHA fired Roberto Bolli, the editor of Circulation Research, after he made comments about gay men that were “alleged to be hate speech.”
A third controversial study has sparked backlash for claiming that being overweight correlates with being less trustworthy.
The article, “Dishonesty is more affected by BMI status than by short-term changes in glucose” was published on July 22 in Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature journal.
A virologist wrote in a tweet:
An ob/gyn asked if the research was a joke:
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Editors need to get off Twitter and make sure the papers they publish are halfway decent during the review process. Once reviewed and accepted as scholarly they should not be retracted just because people don’t like their conclusions.
All these political retractions are doing is feeding the right wing narrative of a dogmatic intolerant academy. Then conservative governments get elected and slash university and research funding (for example, see Australia). The Twitter warriors feel vindicated but the whole sector suffers.
I was in complete and total agreement while reading the first paragraph. I was excited that someone had expressed exactly how I feel. Twitter may be a lot of things, but it is certainly not a scientifically credible source of data.
However, the second paragraph destroyed it! Denigrating things which are politically motivated in the very same sentence where a gross political distortion is made, causes the credibility to vanish.
The truest scientific actually am I ever heard goes: “when politics gets involved, scientific credibility vanishes.“ That works both ways. When politically motivated hacks do a politically motivated study, to further politically motivated causes, there is zero credibility, even if by some sheer stroke of luck they reach a correct conclusion. At the same time, politically motivated tweets by politically motivated hacks to further a politically motivated cause start off with zero credibility, and go downhill from there.
In an earlier comment I made to another RW article, I said that it was my feeling all studies should be published once pier reviewed, irrespective of how “socially acceptable“ they are. It is painfully easy to make a tweet or blog post or editorial article that Round Lee denounces some study because of some nebulous, Politically charged, word. Accusations of “racism,“ for instance, are sprinkled around so liberally that they have lost their true meaning.
If a study is truly flawed; if there was serious bias by the researchers; if it is so obviously errant; if science and the subject matter or so harmed by the study, then it should be a relatively trivial matter to build a counter study which proves that point.
I believe before any response to, or condemnation of, a study is to be taken seriously, it must pass the same muster that the original study had to pass. Thus, unfounded political or emotional comments are just that. They are not scientifically founded replies that should be taken into consideration.
So, wait, are you the deceased David Lee Crites (“Immunotherapy Consulting, Author/Editor/Copywriter, Real Estate Investments, Senior DevOps Engineer”) or Dave Bennett, who also comes up in a search for your Gravatar but looks nothing like the dead Crites in real life?
Actually, the avatar and name agree here: https://www.linkedin.com/public-profile/in/davidleecritesauthor?challengeId=AQFZesLNDuUipAAAAXPTSFSsehIMsuOr7WicginUdSmiTru0_dUGHtfgWQ866xHzbKSanmDf9nUtBNi7SeBOGGWjolBdDJEN3g&submissionId=b7c76560-aa9a-2916-e3b2-3eac5119a965
The right-wing theory of a dogmatic, intolerant academy is in fact true. It is easily observable. You’re observing it right here.
“All these political retractions are doing is feeding the right wing narrative of a dogmatic intolerant academy. Then conservative governments get elected and slash university and research funding (for example, see Australia).”
So you recognize it is true.
“slash university and research funding”
So you okay with violence of forcing people that don’t agree funding what you like. You are also okay with right wing people money but they should have no say.
Well a good way to stop feeding narratives of dogmatic intolerance is to not be dogmatic and intolerant and to include people with different perspectives.
People can get worked up about whatever culture wars issues they like. But the scientific and medical research that we rely on gets caught in the crossfire. Cuts to the sector don’t just hurt grievance studies acolytes – they put people whose work is useful and even lifesaving out of a job. In Australia, universities were explicitly excluded from COVID relief by the conservative government. They have also introduced new funding arrangements that make science degrees cheaper but reduce the overall amount universities will receive for teaching science. So while people’s attention is on the humanities (where student fees are going up) and social justice issues, science is getting screwed. I think the academy’s Twitter warriors are at least partly to blame for bringing this state of affairs on us.
Maybe, but then again publishing serves the purpose of providing scientific legitimacy to ill-informed ‘facts’.
Better to retract than to keep the paper published. Anyway it’s a strange thought that criticizing sexist or racist thoughts would be somehow linked to conservative gov. Being elected. It might be more related to empty promises and offering simple solutions.
As Andrew Gelman might say, the real scandal is not that the BMI-and-lying paper was retracted but that it was published in the first place. The study asks participants to show up to the lab in the morning without having eaten since the previous evening, but does not report any way to directly confirm whether participants had or had not eaten (they indirectly estimate this from a hunger questionnaire and from blood glucose). Then each participant is put into a highly contrived game setting where truthfulness has trivial consequences. From all this, the authors claim to be able to draw general conclusions about propensity to be truthful under general circumstances related to satiety and weight. Not noted in the paper is that the “obese” group is older (mean age ~40 years) than the “lean” group (~30 years), and the “obese” group strongly skews female (>70%) compared to the “lean” group (~50%). Experiment psychologists lean on these kinds of weak study designs, and extrapolate from very specific and contrived experimental settings to general behavioral tendencies, because it is cheap and easy to do so. It should be nearly impossible to publish such a study, but instead it is the bread-and-butter (so to speak) of experimental psychology.
Complaining about self-reported study participant data that isn’t verified is the first spaghetti flung against the wall when someone doesn’t like a study but can’t make any legitimate criticism. When you check to see how well self-reported stuff matches actual behavior, it’s pretty close.
Similarly, it’s an important point to remember that psychology studies often try to generalize their conclusions, and that you should be reluctant to accept those generalizations unless a lot of different studies with different setups and populations tend to the same result. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should only publish impossibly large and convoluted studies. It only means you should be aware individual papers are reports on what people have been finding, and are not in any sense a settled answer.
It’s possible, of course, if the groups are split unevenly along co-variants, then you need to look at whether that’s an issue; this is of course possible (getting a firm answer isn’t always possible). But once someone makes multiple dishonest criticisms, I’m liable to assume someone tried this, and it actually didn’t matter. If it’s possible to make a legitimate counterpoint, why would you make obviously dishonest ones?
The article by Norman C. Wang was thoughtful and well-written, and should not have been retracted. The points made in his article about affirmative action have been made not just by doctors, but also by eminent lawyers and academics in Supreme Court amicus briefs, such as one filed by Professor Richard Sander.
Indeed, Professor Wang is an oft-cited researcher. As a commenter notes on Twitter, “Not only did he have perfect credentials, but he published new papers regularly, and those papers were often used by his colleagues and in fact in at least two journals in 2018-2019 his papers were the papers downloaded the most.”
The liberal columnist Noah Smith says “This is an actually bad case of Cancel Culture. A doctor wrote a paper arguing against affirmative action, and was fired from a position as a result.”
Professor Wang was removed from an administrative position because of his paper. That violates the First Amendment, according to federal court rulings such as Meyers v. City of Cincinnati (1991). The University of Pittsburgh is a public institution whose medical center is thus subject to the First Amendment, as law professor Eugene Volokh has noted in faulting the medical center for removing Professor Wang. Volokh says the medical center violated the First Amendment in its treatment of Professor Wang.
Academics complained that Professor Wang agreed with the Supreme Court’s 2003 Grutter decision that affirmative action should end by 2028. It is a bizarre commentary on academia that agreeing with the Supreme Court is deemed unacceptable. The Supreme Court’s Grutter decision said race-based affirmative action in admissions was generally legal, but only as a transitional measure, and would be unnecessary in 25 years, that is, 2028.
What’s with all the Stepford Wives?
The retracted paper mentioning the downside of affirmative action did not contain any “discriminatory views,” but rather contained views held by other researchers and scholars, such as Professor Richard Sander.
There is a widely-cited book documenting how lower admissions standards for minorities harm many black students, called “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.”
It was perfectly respectable. Legally, it was not racist.
The courts have said opposing affirmative action is not “discriminatory views,” but rather is non-discriminatory, and thus is speech protected by the First Amendment, even when uttered by public officials who have little or no right to engage in racist speech on the job, such as government administrators (see Meyers v. City of Cincinnati (1991)), who can’t be bigots due to their administrative role, and state prison guards, who have very limited free speech rights due to their paramilitary status (see California Department of Corrections v. State Personnel Board (1997)).
Dear Fred, re: “Legally, it was not racist.”
I’m not sure if you are still using Babblespeak ver. 1.0, but you should upgrade to at least 2.1 before posting.
This statement is not a thing.
What is meant is explained in the very next paragraph.
Racism is a form of discrimination, and the courts have ruled that legally, opposing affirmative action is not discriminatory (and therefore not racist).
It’s actually extraordinarily easy to understand.
Well, honestly, after looking into what affirmative action is, it really does seem that opposing it is discriminatory. Discriminated groups tend to have lower odds of getting jobs or education opportunities because of subconscious beliefs that have been essentially indoctrinated into ‘majority’ groups, and affirmative action works to even the playing field, not upset it in favor of minorities. Also, even if the government rules some behavior as acceptable, in this case the opposition of affirmative action, the government isn’t necessarily right. When it comes to issues of ethics, morality, and equality, the government tends to be wrong in the eyes of the people it governs.
My concern with the whole diversity, inclusion, and equity process is that there the POTENTIAL for affirmative action programs to promote or employ otherwise lower-performing persons over higher performers.
Of course the affirmative action hire may have other skills or characteristics that are sought such as cultural understanding, language skills, and ethic community connections that makes that person a more suitable candidate for a particular job.
But in the end, it’s the same joke: What do you call a graduate who completed a medical degree and scored 51% on all exams? Doctor.
“My concern with the whole diversity, inclusion, and equity process is that there the POTENTIAL for affirmative action programs to promote or employ otherwise lower-performing persons over higher performers.”
That is not “POTENTIAL”- That is one of the objectives of Marxists until the world “SCIENCE” looses all its meaning and all reality and values are Political construction.
Once again,
as has been seen time and time again over the last couple of months and years, the real “war on science” is mainly (if not only) waged by the left.
Don’t call the critical whiteness racial quotas crowd left. I am an old-style social democrat leftist and I object. And don’t blame Marx, he would turn in his grave.
” the article may have caused distress to some people. Women’s respect is a priority for us”
Should science care about (some) people’s emotions? A pity, because the study raises an interesting question. Why should increased attractiveness, a plus from an evolutionary perspective, be associated with something which is surely a negative from that same perspective?