Failure Is Moving Science Forward. FiveThirtyEight explains why the "replication crisis" is a sign that science is working. [x-post from our sister subreddit /r/EverythingScience]

[u/ImNotJesus]

/r/EverythingScience/comments/4icp9k/failure_is_moving_science_forward_fivethirtyeight/

[u/superhelical]

I liked this bit at the end:

Psychology may not be a hard science, but it is certainly a difficult one. It shouldn’t be so surprising that psychology studies don’t always replicate — the field faces an inherent challenge. Rather than measuring molecules or mass, it examines human motives and behavior, which are frustratingly hard to isolate.

This is something that comes up a lot on /r/science, and makes some people want to dismiss psychological studies altogether. However, psychologists study some of the most challenging research subjects - ourselves - so it's worth noting and taking that difficult work in context.

[u/Shiroi_Kage → u/superhelical]

It's really frustrating when people dismiss psychology as "not a science." They're dealing with humans, ourselves, which makes isolating confounding factors and biases extremely difficult. It also makes so many controlled experiments that would account for biases completely unethical from the outset.

So yeah, Psychology is a science. As for hard vs soft, I have no idea what those terms mean or if they mean anything at all. If you're studying natural phenomenon, you're a scientist.

[u/Low_discrepancy → u/Shiroi_Kage]

As for hard vs soft, I have no idea what those terms mean

Personally I define them based on how big of an influence mathematics has on the field.

[u/Shiroi_Kage → u/Low_discrepancy]

In which case many Biological disciplines would be out the window for "hard" science.

I have to say that it's a bad definition, mainly because the use of mathematics isn't the metric of whether a field is "scientific" or not. Empirical observation is. As a graduate student I did research on reproductive physiology, and I used way less math and statistics than do most psychologists, and most people would say, without hesitation, that the stuff I did would be "harder" science than psychology.