For the vast edifice of baloney that is social psychology, there’s been good news and bad news lately. The good news is that Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize. Thaler is the foremost evangelist for behavioral economics—the parasitic discipline that uses the findings of social psychology to manipulate, or “nudge,” consumers and citizens into certain kinds of approved behavior. Thaler, for example, has promoted the experiments of the Cornell psychologist Brian Wansink as “masterpieces.”
And the bad news? Several of Brian Wansink’s experiments have recently been shown to be worthless—unappetizing stews of bad data, statistical errors, methodological incompetence, slipshod reporting practices, and unsupported conclusions. In October, the journal JAMA Pediatrics, citing insuperable errors, retracted one of Wansink’s most famous and influential studies. The experiment purported to show that middle-schoolers will be more inclined to eat an apple if you slap an Elmo sticker on it. No joke.
Wansink is a star in the behavioral firmament—bestselling author, TED talker, motivational speaker, Oprah guest, and source for countless journalists, from 60 Minutes to Mother Jones. No less an authority than David Leonhardt of the New York Times has called him “brilliantly mischievous.” Wansink runs Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab, whose goal is to use “the tools of behavioral science” to change “the way food is purchased, prepared, and consumed.” Michelle Obama’s infamous attempt to improve childhood eating habits by turning school cafeterias into Whole Foods knock-offs relied heavily on research from the lab. If your kids have to peel Sesame Street characters off their apples, you know who to thank.
This spring the work of the lab at last drew the attention of skeptics. Reanalyzing four studies claiming to describe the behavior of diners at an Italian buffet, a team of statisticians discovered more than 150 methodological and statistical mistakes, rendering the findings valueless. The Cornell administration undertook its own review and cleared Wansink and his colleagues of “scientific misconduct.” But the work of the lab keeps crumbling, revealing still more errors. Last week’s retraction is only the latest admission of shoddy or deceptive research; there will be many more, and not just from the Food and Brand Lab.
Which raises the question: At what point will the codependents who built the baloney edifice—journalists, regulators, even Nobel economists—admit they’ve been had?
