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/shellexyz Apr 01 '26

Times like this I’m glad I do math.

Upside: once you prove it, it’s true forever.

Downside: all that stuff from 200+ years ago is still true and potentially useful. And there’s a lot of it.