>OSC researchers tried to reproduce an American study that dealt with Stanford University students’ attitudes toward affirmative action policies by using Dutch students at the University of Amsterdam.

If they do conclude things on "students" based on this study, then reproducing it on Dutch students is perfectly fine. If they did conclude something on "Stanford University students", then it is a bad reproduction. You see, there's a very good justification there, that you can interpret as subtyping, or the liskov substitution principle.

>'low reproducability' != 'unethical'

This is akin to saying "ok there's this theorem, but I won't give proof, just a bogus heuristic argument", or even worse, saying "that person is guilty but I won't justify why". Both these behaviors are unacceptable. Why would "social sciences" be above that?

> or 'crisis'

A field is filled of politically oriented baseless claims, but this is not a crisis, just another day in Oceania.

That said, if the meta-study was sloppy, then it still justifies that research standards should have been upped a while ago; the "terrible"" meta-study was accepted precisely because terrible papers are accepted in the first place.