#Trove hacks no survey how to
They strategized how to publish subpar studies, sometimes targeting journals with low standards. In correspondence between 20, the renowned Cornell scientist and his team discussed and even joked about exhaustively mining datasets for impressive-looking results. 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. And he’s had five papers retracted and 14 corrected, the latest just this month. Cornell, after initially clearing him of misconduct, has opened an investigation. 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. 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. Wansink, in contrast, was retroactively creating hypotheses to fit data patterns that emerged after an experiment was over. Ideally, statisticians say, researchers should set out to prove a specific hypothesis before a study begins. Her tenacity ultimately turned the buffet experiment into four published studies about pizza eating, all cowritten with Wansink and widely covered in the press.īut that’s not how science is supposed to work. Initially given a “failed study” with “null results,” Siğirci analyzed the data over and over until she began “discovering solutions that held up,” he wrote. More than three years later, Wansink would publicly praise Siğirci for being “the grad student who never said ‘no.’” The unpaid visiting scholar from Turkey was dogged, Wansink wrote on his blog in November 2016. “I don’t think I’ve ever done an interesting study where the data ‘came out’ the first time I looked at it,” he told her over email. But he wasn’t satisfied by Siğirci’s initial review of the data. Somewhere in those survey results, the professor was convinced, there had to be a meaningful relationship between the discount and the diners. Afterward, they all filled out a questionnaire about who they were and how they felt about what they’d eaten. Some customers paid $8 for the buffet, others half price.
When Siğirci started working with him, she was assigned to analyze a dataset from an experiment that had been carried out at an Italian restaurant.
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