Over at the Cricket Couch, Subash Jayaraman has been doing stellar work (1, 2, 3, 4) scrutinizing Ed Smith’s July 25, 2016 essay* for ESPNCricinfo. Subash shows that the parts of this essay which laid out a brief history of the scientific consensus about stress were drawn, almost verbatim, from an essay published in the Economist on July 23, 2016.
Thanks to Subash’s work, Smith’s essay has now been withdrawn by ESPNCricinfo. As many readers will already know, I have been a freelance contributor to Cricinfo’s Cordon weblog since July 2013. I have also contributed articles to Cricinfo’s monthly magazine The Cricket Monthly. This is also one of the reasons why the frequency of my posts here has declined in recent years.
This post is about two of Ed Smith’s appropriations from the essay in The Economist. I noticed these a week ago, but needed to look up the original work to confirm my suspicion. Today I did so.
The Economist’s article describes Hans Selye’s work on conceptualizing stress at the University of Montreal in the 1930s.
[For] centuries physicists have used the word stress to describe force applied to materials. It was not until the 1930s that Hans Selye, a Hungarian-born endocrinologist, began using it of live beings. Selye injected rats with cow hormones, exposed them to extreme temperatures and partially severed their spinal cords to prove that all these sorts of maltreatment affected the rodents in the same ways: they lost muscle tone, developed stomach ulcers and suffered immune-system failure. He used the word for both the abuse of the rats and the health effects. Later on, it started to be used for psychological suffering as well.
Here’s Ed Smith’s version of the same
For centuries, it belonged to the language of physics: the force applied to materials. Only in the 1930s did Hans Selye, a Hungarian endocrinologist, transport the idea into the realm of live creatures. He exposed cows and rodents to extreme physical deprivation and suffering in order to study the effects on their immune systems and musculature. Subsequently, the word started to be used in the context of psychological as well as physical suffering.
Selye’s original note in Nature(pdf) from 1936 begins as follows:
“Experiments on rats show that if the organism is severely damaged by acute non-specific nocuous agents such as exposure to cold, surgical injury, production of spinal schok (transcision of the cord), excessive muscular exercise, or intoxications with sublethal doses of diverse drugs (adrenaline, atropine, morphine, formaldehyde etc.), a typical syndrome appears, symptoms of which are independent of the nature of the damaging agent or the pharmacological type of the drug employed, and represent rather a response to the damage as such”Selye subjected rats (not rodents – squirrels, hamsters, and porcupines are rodents too) to various harmful things, and found that they demonstrated symptoms which were independent of the specific harmful thing they were subjected to. (The bit about cow hormones is also to be found in Kelly McGonigal’s book The Upside Of Stress which is quoted by the Economist, and by Smith)
In Smith’s retelling, Selye subjected ‘cows and rodents’ to extreme physical deprivation and suffering’. Selye did no such thing. I’m no expert in the field of endocrinology, but I’ve read enough undergraduate essays to know a clumsy effort at appropriating another person’s work when I see it. Even discounting the appropriation side of things, it is clear that Smith’s description of Selye’s work is flatly wrong.
After Subash published his first story, Cricinfo added an update to Smith’s post which said
“The author, who has taken an interest in the study of stress and written on the subject for many years, wanted to acknowledge the Economist’s survey of the subject”
You’d think that someone well versed in a subject would be able to describe the pioneering study on the subject less clumsily.
Let’s move on. Later in the essay, Smith writes
We’re learning that the way we perceive stress changes how it affects us. A study by Alia Crum at Stanford University showed that, once the association became established that stress enhanced performance, professionals found “stressful” circumstances led to heightened engagement and diminished ill-heath.
Here’s the same study in the Economist’s words
People who have a more positive view of stress are more likely to behave in a constructive way: a study by Alia Crum of Stanford University’s Mind and Body Lab and others found that students who believed stress enhances performance were more likely to ask for detailed feedback after an uncomfortable public-speaking exercise.
The Economist and Smith are not saying the same thing. Smith says “the way we perceive stress changes how it affects us”. The Economist refers to people having “a more positive view of stress”.
The paper(pdf) by Crum and her colleagues from 2013 says the following:
[T]he line of research reported here is designed to question whether this focus on the destructiveness of stress—this “stress about stress”—is a mindset that, paradoxically, may be contributing to its negative impact. Our research suggests that improving one’s response to stress may be a matter of shifting one’s mindset. In the context of stress, one’s stress mindset can be conceptualized as the extent to which one holds the belief that stress has enhancing consequences for various stress-related outcomes such as performance and productivity, health and wellbeing, and learning and growth (referred to as a “stress-is-enhancing mindset”) or holds the belief that stress has debilitating consequences for those outcomes (referred to as a “stress-is-debilitating mindset”).
As defined in Crum’s paper, a ‘mindset’ is “a mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and encodes information, thereby orienting an individual toward a unique way of understanding an experience and guiding one toward corresponding actions and responses” (p. 717)
Sensory information has to be present in order for perception to occur. We perceive things about instances of concepts, not concepts themselves. Mindsets, as Crum’s definition shows, are different. For example, it is not possible to perceive that for his Cricinfo essay, Ed Smith appropriated The Economist‘s essay without the two essays being available for comparison. However, after perceiving this about Ed Smith’s essay, it is possible to develop a particularly skeptical mindset towards his future essays.
What Smith has done to The Economist‘s (accurate) description of Crum’s work is similar to what he has done to their (accurate) description of Selye’s work. He has, it appears, replaced a word here and there, and done so in such shabby fashion that it ended up misrepresenting the original work. Even if we discount the probable plagiarism, Smith’s account is wrong. Anybody who bases their understanding of the modern account of stress on Smith’s account will get an incorrect picture. Smith does say towards the beginning of the piece “First cricket, then a little science.” A little science is a dangerous thing.
The most astonishing aspect of this episode is Smith’s total silence in the matter. In the days since July 23, he has, according to his own twitter feed, published multiple articles, including one for Cricinfo. Further, he continues to work as a live commentator for BBC’s prestigious Test Match Special radio commentary team during the on going Pakistan v England series. It is clear, that outside of Cricinfo, who have removed the article from their website, no other publication or platform in the cricket journalism and/or presentation profession (with the exception of a brief note in the Daily Mail) has a word to say about this subject.
Notwithstanding the title, it has not been a pleasure to prepare this post. Cricket writing is not my day job. I do it because I enjoy writing and arguing, and because I love cricket. It is disappointing to see these things being treated so squalidly by a person in Smith’s position. I hope he will explain himself soon, and I really hope the explanation turns out to be innocent.
*This link shows a cached version of the essay from google’s cache. Smith’s essay has been removed from the Cricinfo website.
