Disciplined Conduct of Interdisciplinary Research

Many years ago, an article in a respected marketing journal reviewed then-recent deceptive advertising cases that engendered a new type of consumer remedy in Federal Trade Commission orders. Unfortunately, the article also stated that the commission's authority to impose this type of requirement on advertisers had been upheld by the Supreme Court, citing the court's denial of certiorari in one case. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of U.S. legal procedures knows that a party who wants the nation's highest court to review a decision of a federal or state court files for a writ of certiorari in the Supreme Court, which it grants at its discretion. Denial of certiorari is reported in the case lists, but it only means that the court refused to hear the case. Absent the extremely rare comment on the refusal, the reasons for denial are not known. In legal terms, since the Supreme Court had not heard any appeals on those orders, the Federal Trade Commission's power remained in doubt beyond the single appellate jurisdiction that generated the attempted final appeal. Seeing the citation as marring an otherwise informative detailed descriptive study of regulatory activity, a young assistant professor who spent some semesters in law school before his doctorate contacted the journal editor about publishing a correction or at least a comment on the law. The editor consulted with other marketing experts who, along with the editor, erroneously concluded that a correction was not needed because they believed denial of certiorari means the Supreme Court endorses the appellate court decision. Later that year, another article in the same journal discussed how the Federal Trade Commission could do more to "punish" deceivers, not realizing that the commission cannot use punitive remedies or what the term punishment means to lawyers. Later still, under a different editor, an article referenced marketing journals in analysis of advertising regulation and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, with the authors exhibiting a misunderstanding of the constitutional issues such that their analysis involved several legal errors. This problem works both ways. News coverage of articles in prestigious medical journals frustrates experts on consumer psychology when the article is social science, not medical. Even if the study applies a technically correct method, relevant theories are ignored as the results are presented as a basis for wildly inappropriate conclusions that the news media are only too happy to report. Articles in law journals will sometimes go beyond the authors' expertise in legal analysis to assert invalid presumptions about existing social science theories or research. As a result, experts in consumer decision making know that publications in law reviews might contradict the material found in basic psychology, business or mass communications undergraduate textbooks. It is lawyers who still state a concern about advertisers' use of subliminal advertising messages, as if there existed a valid reason to think it was in use at all or that it would impact consumer decision making. These oversights are easy to understand in the context of who makes the editorial decisions for different publications. …