• brunchyvirus@fedia.io
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    1 day ago

    I’ve always considered sciences like psychology to be more susceptible to the reproducibility crisis. It seems if someone decides to pursue a career in academia the criteria becomes publishing, and well publish or perish as is goes.

    I think some researchers areocing towards things like prerigistering hypothesis and open data+publishing source code for calculations and using that as references in there paper so it can be updated afterwards.

    They’re have definitely been a lot of papers where results were later determined to be wrong but is still referenced because well you can’t update a paper from the 1970s.

    This is hearsay from friends I’ve never done any serious research or published in journals. As a side note I do enjoy reading taking a scroll through https://retractionwatch.com/

    • spankinspinach@sh.itjust.works
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      22 hours ago

      Slightly unrelated tirade:

      Background in psychology here: Psychology and sociology are also terrifyingly hard fields to pin down. Any one human’s behavior can be wildly inconsistent within a given set of parameters, and ppl evolve across time. Cultural context and social expectations come into play at and individual level.

      Add in individual sensitivities to authority, understanding of a request, general intelligence, and you get massively varied outcomes that may change as a person grows and changes.

      Then, for sociology, pile on group pressures and tendencies, plus group think and group cultural context (I have no background in sociology).

      I truly believe psychology and sociology are great fields of study, that yield light on human truths. That said, from a technical scientific perspective, I think it’s nigh impossible to measure their value the same way as you would for mathematics or physics. At least, without finding a way to apply those fields to psychology lol