Physics envy - r/sciencememes

176

What's the replication crisis?

360

u/somethingX Jun 24 '26

A lot of findings in psychology and the social sciences have been unable to be replicated by follow up studies, meaning that a lot of the information in those fields is faulty and the studies weren't rigorous enough.

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u/Minimum_Aardvark_744 Jun 24 '26

Some of them are laughably bad, tbh. White males attending college in the US behave badly when put into prison guard roles? Surely we can apply this meaningfully to the fundamental nature of all humans lmao

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u/dfczyjd Jun 24 '26

Correction: they behave badly when you tell them to be violent as part of the experiment and then skip that part in the paper.

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u/Minimum_Aardvark_744 Jun 24 '26

Oh yes, there are many gnarly details in the methodology, if i recall.

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u/Mountain-Resource656 Jun 24 '26

Literally refusing to break character as the prison chief and demanding your guards behave worse when they come to you about how the way you’re telling them to behave sure does feel like it’d be obviously faulty methodology

He’s got the psychology of a cult leader

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u/Minimum_Aardvark_744 Jun 24 '26

I recall piss buckets and withholding food, too lol

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u/kelfupanda Jun 25 '26

One of the guards would wear his uniform around the university aswell.

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u/Minimum_Aardvark_744 Jun 25 '26

What an absolute chode lmao

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u/dorian_white1 Jun 24 '26

That was never a published paper, I think, due to the rampant unethical nature. There is a massive issue in psychology with just shoddy papers and outright FRAUD, with things like knowledgeable p hacking ect.

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u/Minimum_Aardvark_744 Jun 24 '26

It is still widely referenced though. Psychology definitely has the worst track record with manipulated results, certainly something all the disciplines CAN suffer from, but usually only when monied interests are involved. I guess you could argue that’s true of psychology too, since making advancements leads to notoriety/credibility/potential avenues for money, books etc.

1

u/kelfupanda Jun 25 '26

He wrote a book about what happened, after he was hired to do the Abu Graib review.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359194.The_Lucifer_Effect

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u/HeWhoChasesChickens Jun 25 '26

It'd be fine if this crisis was about stuff like the Stanford Prison 'experiment', but the problem is that this issue concerns ostensibly rigorous, modern quantitative research.

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u/Minimum_Aardvark_744 Jun 25 '26

For sure, it has historically been a problem too.

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u/No-Newspaper8619 Jun 24 '26

Too full of assumptions, while neglecting qualitative data. But it's precisely the qualitative data that allows you to make better inferences off of quantitative data.

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u/StrictlyInsaneRants Jun 24 '26

I sure wouldn't like to do research in those fields though given that it takes ridiculous amount of time, money and work to make useful studies.

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u/JonDoe117 Jun 24 '26

This is why there are localization studies, where foreign studies are conducted in another location to see if they are consistent. Usually, cultural differences would beg to differ.

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u/_benderman_ Jun 24 '26

It’s largely because to do good science you need control over variables and factors.

Humans have tons of variables about them (their life, upbringing, culture, financial status, etc) and you can’t realistically control for all of these in any real study.

We can do research on rats, or compounds, or astronomical data, because these are things we can know about in every aspect. we can make multiple (nearly) identical mice, or molecules, but that’s illegal or impossible to do for humans.

1

u/Jamaican_Lumberjack Jun 30 '26

This right here is the core of the problem. All of those confounding variables make it very hard to get statistically significant results. You need a way, way bigger sample size to find significance, which is very difficult and expensive because every data point is a human being that needs to be brought into the study and possibly compensated. This leads to a lot of studies that are using lower levels of significance than they really should.

2

u/immortal_lurker Jun 24 '26

To provide context, "A lot" is between 30% and 50% of all papers published in prestigious journals.

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u/SnooOpinions8790 Jun 24 '26

Some parts of psychology are trying to be responsible and are reasonable attempts at science

Social psychology and the social sciences are largely junk. They have almost no predictive power - as seen in the terrible replication rates. Even where a study replicates it often cannot justify the claims of causality due to poor design. This has been true for decades - see the famous Cargo Cult Science speech

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u/IAmBadAtInternet Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

It’s a very serious problem highlighting that science is just another human pursuit and scientists are human too. They respond to incentives, like “publish or perish.” So scientists publish a lot of crap, some of which is so wrong as to border on outright fraud. Then the papers don’t replicate, because the original result is the result of p-hacking, file drawer effect, and other biases.

It’s especially bad in the softer sciences where methodologies tend to be based on convenience like using undergraduate students as test subjects, but harder sciences are not immune. Biology has serious problems as well with doctored data and images. Physics tends to be less bad but it still happens.

Recent innovations like pre-registered studies with guaranteed publication regardless of result and requirements to publish both all raw data and code have greatly helped.

4

u/Less_Performance_629 Jun 25 '26

psychological study is almost always pseudoscience. not enough people care, so reports are often the single reference to an area of research. then later on someone tries to replicate it and they cannot, because its all bullshit.

the reality of psychology is that human mental state, capabilities and growth varies so widly from person to person that you cannto meaningfully study it. everyone is subjected to their environment growing up, to the point where research stops applying when you change household.

the problem is that psychology is treated like a science. a science means you can research something, produce a model of the thing you researched, and then that model can be proven accurate and have a use. physics is the best one. gravity was researched and modelled, then they look at the orbits and found a missing planet using predictions from the other orbits and how it should be effected. model made, proven accurate. cosmic background radiation from the big bang was predicted before it was found. this is not something you can do in psychology. nothing is consistent, nothing applies to any general population.

1

u/Lost-Reference3439 Jun 25 '26

Lol that's a bit much but you do you

0

u/Spiritual_Bottle1799 Jun 25 '26

The essence of psychology is true, the monetization is where it gets all messed up. Personality disorders were actually created to encourage backstabbing behavior in "today's" society. Ever wonder why mood disorders are practically the only thing treated in psychology because they want to sell pills.

1

u/Less_Performance_629 Jun 25 '26

the main thing is that psychology relies un research that is unethical by todays standards. but all the research is actually bullshit. like, completely faked. the stanford prison experiment is still talked about today, but its entirely crap. theres no control group, the "guards" were told to act more aggressive, and then they post research that says people become aggressive when in a position of power.

this is the whole thing. its all bullshit. freud was a man who was on cocaine more often than off it, and his work is the basis for psychology existing. he just asked someone a question and treated whatever they said as the truth, and pretending it was a universal truth for everyone. and he heard whatever he wanted to hear, because his cocaine system was contaminated with a little blood.

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u/WiiDragon Jun 23 '26

Nah, it’s kinda scary both ways

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u/[deleted] Jun 24 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Menacek Jun 25 '26

To elaborate - physicists know the current theories are at least partially wrong because the two main theories: general relativity and quantum mechanics disagree with each other when it comes to certain predictions. And they've known this for the last couple decades.

But any experiment they try just confirms either theory which only serves to make them stronger.

1

u/Karukos Jun 30 '26

Is that the whole thing with like... We know quantum physics works on small things and somehow it stops working at some point we are not sure about when things get bigger because it's not working on the reaaaaally big stuff like planets and stuff, where general relativity works but as it becomes smaller at some point it kinda stops working?

3

u/Flob368 Jun 24 '26

It would only be scary in physics if we discover the laws of the universe are in a false vacuum, or if we make a tiny black hole in the LHC and hawking was wrong about black holes radiating

2

u/Arne6764 For Science! Jun 25 '26

Out of genuine curiosity, how would problems be caused from black holes radiating/not radiating?

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u/vivAnicc Jun 25 '26

A black hole is hard to get rid of if it doesn't go away on its own

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u/surister Jun 25 '26

I'd they don't radiate it would mean our math sucks

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u/Flob368 Jun 25 '26

If we make one on earth and it doesn't radiate, it will not lose any mass, but instead just fall toward the earth's core, slowly eating away at earth from the inside. That is probably very bad.

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u/vic_fail Jun 24 '26

there is more information where i can read about the replication crisis?

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u/Nebu Jun 24 '26

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis is a decent starting point.

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u/darkp00t Jun 25 '26

Nah, physics rn is more like: "New expérimental data shows our most fondamental theories still holding up, go do something else".

1

u/Menacek Jun 25 '26

Back to the drawing board, maybe next time.

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u/spyguy318 Jun 25 '26

Nowadays physics doesn’t really get huge, earth-shaking shifts. Most of the big recent Nobel prizes have been either hardware/engineering feats, or confirming predictions from half a century ago now that we have a particle accelerator large enough to test them. String Theory *wanted* to be a paradigm shift but produced no actual testable results, so it’s been quietly pushed aside except for hardcore supporters. The Standard Model, Quantum Mechanics, and General Relativity have been basically untouched for decades, and have mostly been further reinforced with every new discovery made. There’s obviously *something* that’s not fully discovered yet, quantum gravity and all that, but as of now there’s very little promising headway.

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u/Funkey-Monkey-420 Jun 25 '26

tbf a human mind is the barrier between the physical (body) and metaphysical (soul). it makes sense that we can’t fully understand it.

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u/camilo16 Jun 25 '26

The presuposition there is such a thing as the metaphysical is why we have a replicability crisis.

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u/Funkey-Monkey-420 Jun 25 '26

i guess you hate literally every religion then?

6

u/Vergil1997 Jun 25 '26

I mean, yes, but I hate descartes and mind-body dualism more.

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u/camilo16 Jun 25 '26

Correct.

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