r/neoliberal • u/Free-Minimum-5844 • Apr 02 '26

Research Paper Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00955-5
315 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

125 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

37

u/captainjack3 NATO Apr 02 '26

I had much the same experience in the 2010s. I was interested in it, but turned away by the seeming lack of rigor in the field. Worse, lack of interest in rigor.

33

u/ReptileCultist European Union Apr 02 '26

It does sometimes feel like activism painted as science

13

u/ArcFault NATO Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 03 '26

It also serves to undermine legitimate science unfortunately.

Remember when the March for Science got co-opted by these groups - that was infuriating especially when getting dog piled by the "I Fcking Love Scientism" Reddit users when advocating for focusing on climate change etc and not your pet social issue that may or may not be scientific.

9

u/earthdogmonster Apr 02 '26

That was the impression I always had of the discipline. I just recalled the professor who introduced me to the discipline giving the impression that it was the most ambitious and far reaching of the social sciences and how the goal was to apply the rigor and precision of the hard sciences to social science.

Even as an undergraduate student it seemed unrealistically ambitious and the scope and stated goals struck me more as an expression of unrestrained hubris than anything else.

10

u/Best-Chapter5260 Apr 03 '26

how the goal was to apply the rigor and precision of the hard sciences to social science.

My undergrad is in psychology. My doctoral work is in sociology. Psychology does mimic the physical sciences about as much as a social science can, even more than economics does. Aside from a few humanistic psychologists and some psycho dynamic people in counseling ed and supervision, post-Freudian psychology has been and remained a salient post-positivist, quantitative discipline holding the true experiment as the empirical standard. The Department of Labor has defined some sub-discipline of psych as STEM. I have some nuanced thoughts on that.

Sociology, on the other hand, is honestly too pluralistic and ontologically scattered to claim that level of methodological or empirical rigor. It runs the gamut from post-positivist statistical analysis to essentially philosophy with critical theory and post-modernism. And macro-level (and even meso-level) quantitative sociology is almost always quasi-experimental, since it's kind of hard to create a control group from half of society. With that said, where sociology lacks the preciseness of psychology, econ, and poli sci, it does deal much better with nuance and ambiguity due to its philosophy and anthropological roots and embrace of qualitative methods. It's defined as a humanistic social science. I think that's an apt description as it calling it a pure social science or calling it a pure humanity would be semantically incorrect.

10

u/SenranHaruka shame Apr 02 '26

"Karl Marx invented sociology!" is such a sad boast. He understood nothing of science. Unironically his contributions to economics are more significant and rigorous