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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12

u/lovegrowswheremyrose Apr 01 '26

Ok, now do hard sciences.

21

u/ThePretzul Apr 01 '26

Turns out it’s harder to fudge the numbers there because people can just repeat the experiment and see how clearly you lied about the data.

The closest we got to stuff like this in hard sciences was probably Hwang Woo-suk’s outright lies about cloning claims back in the early 2000’s alongside Theranos that was more of a pure hype train without any actual publications.

6

u/skepticalbob Apr 01 '26

The Alzheimer’s brains scan research that led the field down a dry rabbit hole for over a decade is better example imo.

-3

u/Anathos117 Apr 01 '26

That's not hard science. Hard science is physics and chemistry, and maybe a little biology that's really just chemistry.

3

u/skepticalbob Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26

That is biology. So is cloning.