I already said this before and I’ll repeat it. Media constantly portraying social sciences and their findings as actual science, is a big culprit of all this disbelief the masses are showing towards real science (the physical and natural sciences).
An example would be something like chemistry. An experiment could be burning hydrogen with oxygen to see if it yielded water. There is a very strong sense in which anybody could do this same exact experiment. It is repeatable by anybody, it happens in an objective space we can all observe.
Now, take something like history (perhaps one of the social sciences). It's proverbial that history repeats itself, but can you do experiments in history? Not really, because you can't do something like rerun WWII, only this time the nazi's didn't chase out Einstein.
Note, this doesn't mean that History is bogus. Yes, it takes as its object of study something which you can't perform experiments on, but nevertheless, it does have other methods which are apropos to its subject matter, and it is a discipline--doing history is scholarship. It yields knowledge--just not scientific knowledge in the sense of the Baconian scientific method.
Economics is the same--we can't just re-run the Reagan era, only this time without trickle-down economics. If somebody is studying, say, the causes of the great depression, their subject matter isn't something which you can gain knowledge about using experiments. Doesn't mean you can't get economic knowledge in other ways.
So....what about Psychology? Specifically, somebody who studies...deception. Is deception something you gain knowledge about by doing experiments? If you take a group of people and try to deceive them, and study what happens, is that an experiment?
Its not, and for a very interesting reason: the "is-ought" distinction. Experiments can tell you the "is"--what is happening. But they can't tell you the "oughts"--what should be happening. In English, we use two different verb moods to mark the distinction, e.g. "Fred is not lying" vs "Fred should not be lying."
Now, you can perform experiments and observations to determine whether or not Fred is not telling the truth. But lying? Lying has an extra ingredient, the intention to deceive. Intentions are subjective and not observable in the same way that a chemistry experiment is. Very problematic from the standpoint of Baconian science.
But what is completely outside the scope of Baconian science is determining whether a sentence like "Fred should not be lying" is true. If Fred is hiding jews in the basement, should he lie to the stormtroopers at his front door? If he had an affair, but its over and he wants to stay happily married to his wife, should he lie to her if she asked him whether he had an affair?
There are no experiments--in the sense of yielding publicly observable and repeatable results--which will tell you this. Note, this doesn't mean that Psychology is bogus, any more than History is Bogus. It's just Psychology has as its subject matter, some phenomena which are not amenable to experiment. It used to develop methods--like psychoanalysis--which were more apropos to studying its subject matter.
But these days, it seems to be embarrassed about all that, and wants to be a "respectable" science. Instead of Freud theorizing about how childhood trauma affects adult moodiness, they do things like study whether or not prozac helps depression. Studying whether or not a drug can boost serotonin levels in the brain can be investigated scientifically, but in an important sense, it is changing the subject. We're not talking about humans anymore, we are talking about what chemicals do to neuron serotonin re-uptake.
So, what if you are an assistant professor, desperately trying to get some scientific results so you can get tenure? If you try to study something like "deception" scientifically---doing experiments on sophomores--you'll run up against the brute fact that your subject matter can't be studied scientifically. You can call what you are doing "experimenting", but any results you get will not be repeatable.
This is a problem if you are trying to get tenure. Psychology could have just said "hey, we are more like economics and history than we are like chemistry, so lets develop some methods appropriate to investigating our subject matter."
But no. What they did instead was just make up results, on what looks like a phenomenal scale. And its been going so long that we have generations of people who got their Ph.D. from somebody who cheated their way through. And even if they wanted not to cheat---they are competing with their peers who will happily cheat.
The result is sad stories like the OP. It's a vicious circle, a race to the bottom. Honesty is punished, deception is rewarded. The whole field has seriously lost its way. They need to get back to realizing that they are studying a subject matter which needs different methods than experimentation to study.
So let’s not throw the baby out with a bathwater on Science.
I would be interested to see what other peoples comparable list would be for the social sciences – I don’t know enough to say that “absence of evidence is evidence of absence“
I don't think anybody's trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
This is entirely serious. But most people have no idea how broad and deep the reach of the hard science integrity problem goes (at least in biology).
Not only that, but it's HARD for people to know, and there are with 100% certainty efforts to keep it that way.
Social Sciences: "The history of the social sciences began in the Age of Enlightenment after 1650" Established: 1650 AD[1]
Physics: 2224 year history
Social Sciences: 374 year history
Physics: 3 incidents of misconduct on Wikipedia article (and that includes engineering as well).
Social Sciences: 11 incidents of misconduct on Wikipedia article.
Physics: One incident per 741 years.
Social Sciences: One incident per 34 years.
One example: I did a pure-chemistry undergrad degree and a psychology-adjacent graduate degree. The "hard science" degree involved basically zero applied statistics of any kind, any statistics concepts that came up were emergent from lower level stuff even in e.g. stat mech courses, and I wasn't even aware that "Design of Experiments" was a thing. Whereas the "soft science" curricula was heavily focused on statistical rigor, DoE, layers upon layers of internal controls, and so forth; basically because there was no practical way to see an unambiguous effect. It certainly seemed "rigorous".
However the soft science stuff just has less predictive power despite the rigor. In broad sense it relates to human perception, capabilities of technology, model systems, semiotics/epistemology (maybe wrong word), prediction/confirmation, especially faith.
For example, at a macro scale on Earth, it is very easy to accurately predict at human scale how things work. Micro scale physical objects require a bit more bootstrapping. You can't see most molecules or atoms, so you have to come up with a way of inferring measurements through other processes which themselves have to be trustworthy. Etc.
At some point of course, one has to select some model as an axiom or matter of faith to make any progress. You can't model a dropping brick if you can't trust your timer or measuring tape, etc. So you stand on giants' shoulders and make a predictive model as an extension of the axiomatic one.
This starts getting really squishy when you're dealing with entire concepts that have no agreed upon definition whether quantitative or qualitative and try to make them into something onto which statistical rigor can be applied!!!!!
So with soft-science literature it is always extremely important to mentally substitute the details of a model's implementation, for the shorthand expression used to describe it which may overlap with a commonly used word.
For example, "We found that this drug candidate significantly reduced depression in mice" -> "We found that this drug candidate significantly increased the amount of time mice swim around before giving up when you chuck them into a tank of water, etc.
because the rigorous conclusion might not actually be practically meaningful if the axioms are practically unpredictive.
And even worse, going back to the "no agreed definition" thing, the definitions of psychological concepts are only defined in terms of these very vague experiments! It's like bootstrapping physics if you're a disembodied nothing in a simulation.
idk there's much more to say on this but I'm procrastinating at work so
Social sciences get to lay claim to CBT?
BTW, social sciences get credit for the modern economy and for the known history of humankind, for modern farming, for today’s government and policy, for mental health and mental therapies, for modern advertising, for understanding of languages, and for modern corporate management, just to name a few.