[2][3][4][5][6][7] On September 20, 2018, Cornell determined that Wansink had committed scientific misconduct and removed him from research and teaching activities; he resigned effective June 30, 2019.
[8] He was raised in a blue-collar family and is the older brother of Craig Wansink,[9] a professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Virginia Wesleyan.
[12] Another of his papers found that people who eat with someone who is overweight will make worse food choices, which the UK National Health Service described as "not wholly convincing and does not prove this phenomenon exists in the general population.
"[13] In 2005, Wansink's lab published experimental findings in a paper called "Bottomless bowls: why visual cues of portion size may influence intake".
In this study, the lab built an apparatus containing a tube that pumped soup into the bottom of a bowl at a steady rate as the participant ate.
[21] In a 2009 paper retracted in 2018,[22] 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.
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.
[2][3] According to critics, requests for access to the original data were denied by Wansink, who cited privacy issues regarding the anonymity of the participants.
[3] A few days later, Cornell released a statement that the university administration had conducted a preliminary investigation of Wansink's four pizza papers, and had not found evidence of scientific misconduct.
[33][30][34][7] In September 2018, Cornell determined that Wansink had committed scientific misconduct and removed him from all teaching and research positions; he was only allowed to help in investigations of his published work.
[6] After the announcement of his misconduct and resignation, Wansink acknowledged in emails to Buzzfeed that there had been some problems with his publications but also wrote, "There was no fraud, no intentional misreporting, no plagiarism, or no misappropriation.