Brian Wansink

Brian Wansink
Wansink in 2007
Born	Sioux City, Iowa
Known for	Food behavior and psychology
Awards	Ig Nobel Prize (2007)
Scientific career
Fields	consumer behavior, nutrition psychology
Institutions	Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Brian Wansink is an American who worked in the fields of consumer behavior and marketing research. He is the former executive director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) (2007–2009) and held the John S. Dyson Endowed Chair in the Applied Economics and Management Department at Cornell University, where he directed the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.^[1]

Wansink's lab researched people's food choices and ways to improve those choices. Starting in 2017, problems with Wansink's papers and presentations were brought to wider public scrutiny. These problems included conclusions not supported by the data presented, data and figures duplicated across papers, questionable data including impossible values and incorrect and inappropriate statistical analyses, and data manipulation via "p-hacking".^[2][3] The lab had thirteen papers retracted (one twice) and had 15 corrections issued.^[4][5][6] On September 20, 2018, Cornell determined that Wansink had committed scientific misconduct and removed him from research and teaching, limiting his activity to cooperating with further investigation of his papers; he resigned effective June 30, 2019.^[6]

Early life and education

Brian Wansink was born in Sioux City, Iowa.^[7] He was raised in a blue-collar family and is the older brother of Craig Wansink,^[8] a professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Virginia Wesleyan.^[9] Wansink received a B.S. in Business Administration from Wayne State College (Nebraska) in 1982 and an M.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication from Drake University in 1984, followed by a Ph.D. in Marketing (Consumer Behavior) in 1990 from Stanford Graduate School of Business.^[1]

Wansink is married and has three daughters. His wife is a trained chef.^[10]

Career

Cornell Food and Brand Lab outreach

Wansink's first academic appointment was to the faculty of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College (1990–1994). He taught at the Wharton Graduate School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (1995–1997), and was a marketing, nutritional science, advertising, and agricultural economics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1997–2005) before moving to the Department of Applied Economics and Management in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University in 2005.^[1]

He set up a nonprofit foundation to support his work in 1999.^[7][8]

Wansink's research focuses on ways people make choices – for example, how portion sizes affect food intake. Some of his work led to the introduction of mini-size packaging.^[11] Another of his papers found that people who eat with someone who is fat will make worse food choices, which the UK NHS described as "not wholly convincing and does not prove this phenomenon exists in the general population."^[12]

In 2005, Wansink's lab published experimental findings in a paper titled, "Bottomless bowls: why visual cues of portion size may influence intake". In the "bottomless bowls study", an apparatus was built which contained a tube that pumped soup into the bottom of a bowl at a steady rate as the participant ate. Participants who ate from the bottomless bowl consumed more soup than those whose bowls were filled manually (thus were aware of the amount they consumed).^[13][14] In 2007, Wansink received the Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition for the "bottomless bowls" study.^[15] The experiment's data and analysis were challenged as part of the review of Wansink's body of work that started in 2017.^[16]

In 2006, Wansink published Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.^[11] It was described as a popular science book combined with a self-help diet book, as each chapter ends with brief advice.^[17] The book details Wansink's research into what, how much, and when people eat.^[11][18] The book was cited by the National Action Against Obesity as being helpful in effort to curb obesity in the United States.^[19]

Wansink was appointed as the executive director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion from November 2007 through January 2009. He was responsible for oversight of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, MyPyramid.gov, and various other food-related programs administered by the USDA.^[20] In 2011, Wansink was elected to a one-year-term as president of the Society for Nutrition Education.^[21]

In a 2009 paper, a team led by Wansink described their finding that calorie counts in The Joy of Cooking had gone up around 44% since the cookbook's first edition in 1936, and related this to the obesity epidemic. Over time this finding became a shorthand way to refer to the unhealthy western pattern diet. The publisher of Joy of Cooking, John Becker, noticed that Wansink's sample size was small, consisting of only 18 recipes out of about 4500 that were published during the study time interval, and did his own analysis of changes in calories in the recipes. In 2017, after news of Wansink's research practices became widely discussed in the media, Becker sent his results to several statisticians, including James Heathers, a behavioral scientist at Northeastern University. Heathers found Wansink's conclusions to be invalid, and found a number of problems with Wansink's paper, including counting a whole cake as a "serving" and comparing a recipe for a clear chicken soup with one for gumbo.^[22][23]

Wansink's second book, Slim by Design was released in 2014. During 2014 he ran a Kickstarter campaign and raised around $10,000 to fund a coaching program based on the book; as of February 2018 the program had not been produced.^[24]

Wansink's research came under scrutiny in 2017, leading to several retractions and an investigation by Cornell into the integrity of his work. In September 2018, Cornell determined that Wansink had committed scientific misconduct, and removed him from all teaching and research positions; he was restricted solely to cooperating with people investigating his publications. He also resigned from the university, effective June 30, 2019.^[6] After the announcement of the findings and his resignation, in an email exchange with Buzzfeed, Wansink acknowledged some problems with his published work and also wrote: "There was no fraud, no intentional misreporting, no plagiarism, or no misappropriation."^[6]

Retractions and corrections

Pizza papers

Panel from a 2011 xkcd cartoon explaining p hacking, in which scientists look for relationships between many colors of jelly beans and acne, and find a p value <0.05 only for green ones.^[25]

Cited in New York Magazine piece about Wansink lab's p hacking.^[2]

In January 2017, the validity of research from Wansink's labs was called into question by Jordan Anaya, Nicholas J L Brown, and Tim van der Zee, after Wansink had written a blog post about asking a graduate student to "salvage" conclusions from a study which had null results, subsequently producing five papers from it, all published with Wansink as co-author.^[3] Van der Zee, Anaya, and Brown analysed four of the five papers (referred to as "the pizza papers"), and found conclusions not supported by the data presented, and a total of 150 questionable numbers, such as impossible values, incorrect ANOVA results, and dubious p-values.^[2][3] According to the critics, requests for access to the original data were denied by Wansink, who cited privacy issues over the anonymity of the participants. A February 2017 article in New York Magazine described the pizza papers as "shockingly unprofessional" and expressed concern over the journals that published them.^[2]

In response, Wansink announced an in-depth review of the four disputed papers, after locating some of the original datasets,^[26] and published a detailed response in March 2017.^[3] A few days later, Cornell released a statement confirming that the university administration had conducted a preliminary investigation of Wansink's four pizza papers, and had not found evidence of scientific misconduct. The investigation did find multiple cases of self-plagiarism and confirmed "numerous instances of inappropriate data handling and statistical analysis", requiring Wansink to hire independent, external statistical experts to check and reanalyze his own review of the papers.^[3][27]

Books

• Sudman, Seymour; Wansink, Brian (2002). Consumer Panels (2nd ed.). Chicago, Ill.: American Marketing Association. ISBN 978-0-87757-297-8.
• Bradburn,, Norman M.; Sudman, Seymour; Wansink, Brian (2004). Asking Questions : the definitive guide to questionnaire design for market research, political polls, and social and health questionnaires (Rev. ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. ISBN 978-0-7879-7088-8.
• Wansink, Brian (2004). Marketing Nutrition : soy, functional foods, biotechnology, and obesity (First Illinois paperback ed.). Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-02942-4.
• Wansink, Brian (2006). Mindless Eating : why we eat more than we think. New York: Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0-553-80434-8.
• Wansink, Brian (2014). Slim by Design : mindless eating solutions for everyday life. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 978-0062136527.

See also

• List of scientific misconduct incidents

References

External links

• Official website

Further reading

• van der Zee, Tim; Anaya, Jordan; Brown, Nicholas J L (25 January 2017). "Statistical heartburn: An attempt to digest four pizza publications from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab". PeerJ Preprints. doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.2748v1. ISSN 2167-9843. Retrieved 15 March 2017.
• Wansink, Brian (April 2017). "A Note from Brian Wansink on Research". Archived from the original on 5 April 2017.
• Wansink, Brian. "Authors' responses to "Statistical heartburn: An attempt to digest four pizza publications from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab"" (PDF). Archived from the original (pdf) on 7 April 2017.
• Wansink, Brian. "Responses to "Statistical Heartburn: An Attempt to Digest Four Pizza Publications from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab" - Table of 150 Inconsistencies" (PDF). Archived from the original (pdf) on 5 April 2017.
• "Cornell University Statement Regarding Questions About Professor Brian Wansink's Research". Cornell University. 5 April 2017. Archived from the original on 19 March 2018.
• "Statement of Cornell University Provost Michael I. Kotlikoff". Cornell University. September 20, 2018. Archived from the original on September 21, 2018.