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A Cornell professor whose buzzy and accessible food studies made him a media darling has submitted his resignation, the school said Thursday, a dramatic fall for a scholar whose work increasingly came under question in recent years. The university said in a statement that a year-long review found that Brian Wansink "committed academic misconduct in his research and scholarship, including misreporting of research data, problematic statistical techniques, failure to properly document and preserve research results, and inappropriate authorship."
Wansink, a marketing professor at Cornell's business college who was the director of the university's Food and Brand Lab, will retire at the end of the academic year, the school said. The move follows the recent retraction of six of Wansink's papers by the American Medical Association's JAMA Network, including those about how serving bowl size affected food consumption, how fasting changed people's food preferences and how action-packed television programs increased food intake.
Wansink emailed The Washington Post on Thursday a news release of his retirement, which included statements attributed to a university trustee saying that "Cornell and Professor Wansink mutually have decided that Professor Wansink's research approach and goals differ from the academic expectations of Cornell University, and they have decided to part ways accordingly." Wansink said he is leaving his position June 30, 2019.
For years, Wansink enjoyed a level of prominence that many academics would strive for, his work spawning countless news stories. He published a study showing that people who ate from "bottomless" bowls of soup continue to eat as their bowls are refilled, as a parable about the potential health effects of large portion sizes. Another, with the title "Bad popcorn in big buckets," similarly warned about the perils of presenting food in big quantities, according to Vox.
Also at Science Magazine, Ars Technica, CNN, and Retraction Watch.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday September 24 2018, @05:04PM (6 children)
Frauds in science get caught this way all the time. If you make a big claim, you'd better not have knowingly cheated, and you need to be careful you didn't make too many mistakes. No mistakes at all would be nice, but that's very hard to do and a few honest and minor mistakes are livable, and won't kill a career in science. But being slipshod will. Not checking and double checking things can be as bad as outright falsification of data. Double checking can be tedious, hard work, but it should not be blown off, lest you embarrass yourself.
When a clown or a fraud with some claim to respectability such as a PhD makes an extraordinary claim, it's going to get publicity, and it's going to be checked. A little bitty finding might fly under the radar, but a big one, no way. And if it's wrong, it will be found out. All kinds of further advances and uses would end up depending upon those findings, and if they are wrong, people are going to notice they're having problems going further, and things aren't working the way the fraudulent results say they should. They may then try to replicate the original findings, and learn that it is impossible. You just can't get away with a Big Lie, not in science. See Cold Fusion, and the practically magical claims of Hwang Woo-suk around stem cells.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday September 24 2018, @05:14PM (2 children)
But, you can get away with a Big Lie if you get media, celebrities and other morons to defend you by telling them exactly what they want to hear, like Andrew Wakefield.
Maybe we are more cautious now, and will no longer let a dickhole like that get a foothold. I somehow doubt it.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Touché) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday September 24 2018, @06:29PM
I've read the exact same things by many people on the internets about how corporations control us. Eg., plate sizes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @07:45PM
Or if you just keep lying so fast that the media can't follow one lie up before 5 more have been made.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @05:27PM (2 children)
No, the institutionalized peer review did nothing, it was 100% worthless and this guy was allowed to run rampant.
It was all that people outside his field started looking closer at his work. It was because this blog post went viral making him look like a manifestion of all that is wrong modern academia. He was proud of getting 5 papers out of noise by cherry-picking, p-hacking, etc. He then praises the immigrant PhD student who did this for him while criticizing another one who refused to:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170312041524/http:/www.brianwansink.com/phd-advice/the-grad-student-who-never-said-no [archive.org]
Then, of course, all his papers were found to be riddled with errors of every kind (numbers not adding up, etc).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @05:36PM
And to be sure, the reason he wrote this blog post is because such behaviour is standard in many areas of research. Tens of billions of dollars is being pissed away every year on stuff like this, and in fact the people who do it are rewarded with publications while those who refuse to are ostracized and punished. Exactly like he describes. He only got caught due to how apt his inadvertent description was of the "publication mill" academia has become.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Tuesday September 25 2018, @03:29AM
Ah, yes...What was the old saw about "Lies, damn lies and statistics"?
When life isn't going right, go left.