Mindless eating: is there something rotten behind the research?

A storm of retractions, corrections, data irregularities and controversy over duplicate publication are destroying the credibility of Cornell's Food and Brand Lab. It's time for the university to be open about what's going on

Most people probably haven't heard of the beleaguered marketing professor, Brian Wansink, but chances are many will know about his work. Wansink is the mind behind the concept of "mindless eating" - the idea that the unconscious decisions we make about food can have profound effects on our diet and weight. Ideas like using smaller plates to eat fewer calories are pretty much engrained in our collective common sense, and stem from Wansink's work over the past 20 years at the University of Illinois and now at Cornell University's "Food and Brand Lab". But for over a year, the veracity of Wansink's research has been increasingly called into question, with five papers retracted (one of which was retracted twice), fourteen corrected, and over fifty others facing scrutiny.

The latest paper to fall under the spotlight is also one of Wansink's most famous experiments. The 2005 paper, titled Bottomless bowls: Why visual cues of portion size may influence intake, was a landmark study for Wansink. In it, participants were sat down at a table in groups of four, each in front of bowl of tomato soup. They were given twenty minutes to eat as much as they wanted, and then asked to rate, among other things, how much soup they thought they had actually eaten. The key manipulation was that while two of the participants had been sat in front of a normal soup bowl, the other two had bowls that could be covertly filled from the bottom. Wansink and his team claimed that although the participants given the self-refilling bowls ate about three quarters more soup, they didn't believe that they had eaten any more than the other people around the table. This idea formed a core component of the well-known diet book Mindless Eating, and even won an Ig Nobel prize in 2007.