Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

Wansink wrote a blog post about how he’d encouraged one of his graduate students to analyse a dataset he’d collected in a New York pizza restaurant.46 The original hypothesis, he said, had ‘failed’, but instead of publishing those null results or file-drawering the whole thing, he told the student that ‘there’s got to be something [in the dataset] we can salvage’. She complied, and ‘every day … came back with puzzling new results … and every day … c[a]me up with another way to reanalyse the data’. By openly admitting to dredging through his datasets looking for anything that was ‘significant’, Wansink had unintentionally revealed a major flaw in the way he, and unfortunately many thousands of other scientists, conducted research. That flaw has been dubbed ‘p-hacking’.