Brian Wansink Scientific Misconduct?

suzannesimmons3 wrote: »

Buzzfeed. ....really.....

The main scientist behind the work, Cornell University professor Brian Wansink, has made headlines for his research into the psychology of eating. His experiments have found, for example, that women who put cereal on their kitchen counters weigh more than those who don’t, and that people will pour more wine if they’re holding the glass than if it's sitting on a table. Over the past two decades he’s written two popular books and more than 100 research papers, and enjoyed widespread media coverage (including on BuzzFeed).

Yet over the past year, Wansink and his “Food and Brand Lab” have come under fire from scientists and statisticians who’ve spotted all sorts of red flags — including data inconsistencies, mathematical impossibilities, errors, duplications, exaggerations, eyebrow-raising interpretations, and instances of self-plagiarism — in 50 of his studies.

Wansink began drawing scrutiny last November when, in a now-deleted blog post, he praised a grad student for taking the data from a “failed study” of an all-you-can-eat Italian lunch buffet and reanalyzing it multiple times until she came up with interesting results. These findings — that, for example, men overeat when women are around — eventually resulted in a series of published studies about pizza consumption.

To outside scientists, it reeked of statistical manipulation — that the data had been sliced and diced so much that the results were just false positives. It’s a problem that has cropped up again and again in social science research, and that a growing number of scientists are trying to address by replicating studies and calling out errors on social media.

Over the winter, van der Zee saw that Wansink’s blog post was accruing dozens of disapproving comments. He teamed up with two other scientists who were similarly intrigued: Nicholas Brown, also a graduate student in the Netherlands, and Jordan Anaya, a computational biologist in Virginia. At first they exchanged emails with Wansink about apparent errors in four of the pizza papers, van der Zee said. But when he stopped replying to them, they decided to go public with the 150 errors they’d found in the four papers. Then Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, accused Wansink’s lab of manipulating the data — or using “junk science,” in his words — to dress up their conclusions.

These critiques soon captured journalists’ attention. In early February, Retraction Watch interviewed Wansink about his disputed work, and New York magazine declared that “A Popular Diet-Science Lab Has Been Publishing Really Shoddy Research.”

On March 21, van der Zee decided it was time to formally keep track of all the issues that he and others were finding. “The Wansink Dossier” mushroomed into a list of dozens of allegedly faulty papers.

Soon the editor of JAMA Pediatrics, Frederick Rivara, emailed Wansink with a link to Brown’s critique of the Elmo apples study. “Upon reflection, we share several of the concerns outlined in the blog post,” Rivara wrote. In a later email, he wrote, “There is substantial missing data.” (Rivara declined to comment.)

Wansink consulted a few colleagues, including a public relations director at Cornell, to figure out how to respond. “I think I should send him a note,” he wrote. “This is data that we can’t seem to find.”

So began a mad scramble, with the researchers combing computers and old emails and contacting ex-colleagues in search of the original data.

suzannesimmons3 wrote: »

Tbh no....I only saw buzzfeed

janejellyroll wrote: »

Jruzer wrote: »

@RemoteWilderness, I can see by the amount of responses this thread is getting that it is extremely interesting to many members.

Criminy, I knew I should have put something about "exercise calories", or "keto", or "Texas" in the title. From now on I'll be sure to only post from the approved list of topics.

For what it's worth, I read it and found it extremely interesting but I didn't feel like I had anything to contribute to the conversation so I didn't write anything about it. So . . . from at least one poster, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Azdak wrote: »

Jruzer wrote: »

@RemoteWilderness, I can see by the amount of responses this thread is getting that it is extremely interesting to many members.

Criminy, I knew I should have put something about "exercise calories", or "keto", or "Texas" in the title. From now on I'll be sure to only post from the approved list of topics.

Marketplace of ideas, bro.