Maybe a better question - should psychology even be considered scientific or a science in the first place?
Psychology is fuzzy because of the subject matter, but (appropriately I think) it's also better at turning the microscope on itself (meta-analysis really has its origins in psychology).
Pretending this doesn't happen elsewhere is dangerous. Maybe the rates vary from field to field, but psychology isn't alone. If you applied that standard to every field there would be almost nothing left except maybe physics and some other closely related fields.
Reversals through replication failure is scientific progress. Your “better” question is nothing of the sort, just lazy contrarianism.
I of course exempt my own field, linguistics, which is the most scientific of all. (Yes, that is a joke.)
Not really. If a flat earther comes and says that the earth is flat, and you take him up in a airplane and show him the curvature of the earth, he can’t say that flat earth study is science because “reversals through replication failure is scientific progress”
There is a difference between making real scientific contributions through careful research, trial design, and statistical analysis, and spouting BS.
After a bunch of high profile reversals, psychology is looking more like the spouting BS group that then justifies themselves by saying that clearing up BS is scientific advancement.
If we want society to be able to actually use science to make decisions, then we have to be careful to differentiate science from BS.
Psychology has embraced scientific methodology. However, it has struggled to produce a reliable scientific knowledge base. There are some successes in psychology, that tempt one to apply the label "scientific," but they are in areas that might be controversial, such as advertising and manipulation.
I refer you to my statement about "unchallenged assumptions". Like the assumption that the reductive scientific process can be glibly applied to emergent complex phenomenon like psychology. As I said, people can say they are doing science, it neither means what they are doing is good or correct science.
Here, for example, is Brittanica's:
> Science, any system of knowledge that is concerned with the physical world and its phenomena and that entails unbiased observations and systematic experimentation. In general, a science involves a pursuit of knowledge covering general truths or the operations of fundamental laws.
> Science can be divided into different branches based on the subject of study. The physical sciences study the inorganic world and comprise the fields of astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the Earth sciences. The biological sciences such as biology and medicine study the organic world of life and its processes. Social sciences like anthropology and economics study the social and cultural aspects of human behaviour.
https://www.britannica.com/science/science
This article has been on the web since 1998. The Encyclopedia from which it is sourced has been publishing in print since 1768. If the entry on Science wasn't in the first edition, it probably wasn't too long before it first appeared.
I encourage you to take your issue up with the editors and authors there.
https://corporate.britannica.com/contact/
Do let us know how you make out!
Yet at the same time, I think psychology is especially susceptible to these problems, because it is a more fuzzy "social science" (more like sociology, less like physics). It suffers immense bias due to those who select themselves into the field and also how they study it. Psychology researchers typically conduct non-generalizable experiments with immense sampling bias (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/non-weird-science/20...). Then there are replication problems (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psycholo...). They're also not making any progress in addressing these issues because of meta cultural problems about acknowledging problems in the field (https://www.wired.com/2016/03/psychology-crisis-whether-cris...).
You can do good scientific research in that field. But it's much harder than in other fields.
Some alternatives exist - for example, some studies can be run on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Tom Griffiths using this to good effect. (& I did the same for my dissertation)