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How an Ivy League scientist turned shoddy data into media sensations

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https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/b...-p-hacking

EXCERPT: . . . “It does very much seem like this Brian Wansink investigator is a consistent and repeated offender of statistics,” Susan Wei added. “He’s so brazen about it, I can’t tell if he’s just bad at statistical thinking, or he knows that what he’s doing is scientifically unsound but he goes ahead anyway.”

[...] that’s not how science is supposed to work. Ideally, statisticians say, researchers should set out to prove a specific hypothesis before a study begins. [Brian] Wansink, in contrast, was retroactively creating hypotheses to fit data patterns that emerged after an experiment was over.

Wansink couldn’t have known that his blog post would ignite a firestorm of criticism that now threatens the future of his three-decade career. Over the last 14 months, critics the world over have pored through more than 50 of his old studies and compiled “the Wansink Dossier,” a list of errors and inconsistencies that suggests he aggressively manipulated data. Cornell, after initially clearing him of misconduct, has opened an investigation. And he’s had five papers retracted and 14 corrected, the latest just this month.

Now, interviews with a former lab member and a trove of previously undisclosed emails show that, year after year, Wansink and his collaborators at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab have turned shoddy data into headline-friendly eating lessons that they could feed to the masses. In correspondence between 2008 and 2016, the renowned Cornell scientist and his team discussed and even joked about exhaustively mining datasets for impressive-looking results. They strategized how to publish subpar studies, sometimes targeting journals with low standards. And they often framed their findings in the hopes of stirring up media coverage to, as Wansink once put it, “go virally big time.”

[...] Wansink’s practices are part of a troubling pattern of strategic data-crunching across the entire field of social science. Even so, several independent statisticians and psychology researchers are appalled at the extent of Wansink’s data manipulation. [...] “this is not science, it is storytelling.”

[...] The so-called replication crisis has punctured some of the world’s most famous psychology research, from Amy Cuddy’s work suggesting that “power poses” cause hormonal changes associated with feeling powerful, to Diederik Stapel’s fabricated claims that messy environments lead to discrimination. In an influential 2015 report, Nosek’s team attempted to repeat 100 psychology experiments, and reproduced less than one-half of the original findings.

One reason for the discrepancy is “p-hacking,” the taboo practice of slicing and dicing a dataset for an impressive-looking pattern. It can take various forms, from tweaking variables to show a desired result, to pretending that a finding proves an original hypothesis — in other words, uncovering an answer to a question that was only asked after the fact.

[...] These papers are only a fraction of the 250-plus that Wansink has produced since the early 1990s. One of the driving factors behind his prolific output, his emails suggest, is a hard truth that all academic scientists face: The more papers you publish, the more likely you are to be rewarded in promotions, funding, and fame.

[...] To [Nick] Brown, the grad student who may know Wansink’s work better than Wansink himself, the lab is like a food-processing company.

“What they’re doing is making a very small amount of science go a very long way when you spread it thinly and you cut it with water and modified starch,” he said. “The product, which is the paper, is designed and marketed before it’s even been built.”

He suspects that more of Wansink’s papers will be corrected or even retracted. (Cornell confirmed to BuzzFeed News that its investigation into Wansink’s research is ongoing, but declined to share any details.)

Brown is less sure, however, whether this saga will lead to any meaningful changes beyond Wansink’s oeuvre. As illuminating as the emails are — he likens them to security footage of a bank robbery — he also thinks that the behavior is “probably quite typical of what goes on in a lot of labs.”

MORE: https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/b...-p-hacking
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