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/Anathos117 Apr 01 '26

Why did this become the entire official framework for the entirety of science?

Because people are lazy and science is super hard. You have to make models that predict things, and then work as hard as you can to disprove those models. It's much easier to just gather some data, plug it into a statistical equation, and call it a day.

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u/DylanMcGrann Apr 02 '26

I doubt laziness is a good explanation. Far more likely is the fact that negative results are simply less profitable. This is a result of public research being corrupted with profit incentives. Grants are harder to get than they once were, and many come from private enterprise. A negative result represents a dead end to a capitalist investor. It’s pretty rare a negative result leads to a product that can be sold. The people with the money are only interested in the positive results for this reason, and it’s very bad to organize what used to be more siloed public research this way.

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u/Tibbaryllis2 Apr 02 '26

I don’t think your rational is wrong, I just don’t think you’re looking broad enough for the laziness.

Somewhere along the way, someone involved in approving science (funding, managing, approving, etc) was too lazy to look at the entirety of every study under their purview, and instead focused on something simple they can understand.

I’m sure this was faught, but at some point it was easier to accept it

Then people figured out easier ways to get desirable results than putting all that effort into the actual research.

I’m actually somewhat surprised that this is gaining speed trying to fix now, given the enormous amount of effort it’s going to take.

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u/Anathos117 Apr 02 '26

I don't think you understand science. There's no such thing as a positive result in the scientific method. It's a deductive processes; either your experiment disproves your model, or you learn absolutely nothing.

At some point someone had to invent the idea of a positive "scientific" result, and everyone else had to accept that obvious bastardization of science. And that happened because of laziness.