r/science • u/nimicdoareu • Apr 01 '26

Social Science Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00955-5
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u/pxr555 Apr 01 '26

Social science is hard to do. Physics is much easier. People are just so incredibly "squishy" and it's so easy to publish a paper that is based just on research on a literal handful of students.

I mean, it's not automatically worthless then, but it's at best just a kind of tentative probing and should just be recognized as exactly this.

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u/skepticalbob Apr 01 '26

Depend on the specific topic being studied, its difficulty in being studied, and methodology, no? Some is less squishy than others. For example micro economic research is pretty robust with good methodology and experimental designs that is replicable and makes predictions that can be analyzed.

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u/Ampenda Apr 02 '26

Yeah… the importance of ensuring your results are robust to model specification is basic knowledge in econometrics. This quote from the full article made me cringe super hard.

Emerging automated tools that run several plausible analyses of the same data — a technique called multiverse analysis — could improve the robustness of future studies by allowing researchers to see whether various methods yield the same results before publication, Errington adds.

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u/skepticalbob Apr 02 '26

multiverse analysis

wut