Science first, communication second. A prequel to the Food and Brand Lab episode

The Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, led by Brian Wansink (@BrianWansink) caused quite some academic turmoil these recent weeks. This contrasts sharply with the media turmoil usually generated by this lab's research. A series of academic social media posts and a critical article target the lab's inferior methodology and old school approach to rendering null-effects into (a set of) publishable papers. In this post, I want to give my account of a previous similar situation that I had with the same lab in 2012. I think the take-home-messages of this post are the following. First, I want to claim that the recent controversy fits within a longer tradition that pertains to this lab (but maybe also a large part of their discipline) and this just shows that a science revolution for reproducible findings is not a matter of a few years. Second, I do think that given previous criticism on their work, it is astonishing that it has not improved to some extent. Researchers should be more responsive to how the field reacts to their work. Third, the case seems to demonstrate a troublesome trend where labs and universities tend to invest more in PR than in research methodology and ethics. Although I am an enthusiast of science communication, we should not neglect the order in these words: science-communication. "Science first, communication second"