Jason Mitchell is [edit: has been] the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard. He has won the National Academy of Science's Troland Award as well as the Association for Psychological Science's Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contribution.
Here, he argues against the principle of replicability of experiments in science. Apparently, it's disrespectful, and presumptively wrong.
Recent hand-wringing over failed replications in social psychology is largely pointless, because unsuccessful experiments have no meaningful scientific value.
Because experiments can be undermined by a vast number of practical mistakes, the likeliest explanation for any failed replication will always be that the replicator bungled something along the way. Unless direct replications are conducted by flawless experimenters, nothing interesting can be learned from them.
Three standard rejoinders to this critique are considered and rejected. Despite claims to the contrary, failed replications do not provide meaningful information if they closely follow original methodology; they do not necessarily identify effects that may be too small or flimsy to be worth studying; and they cannot contribute to a cumulative understanding of scientific phenomena.
Replication efforts appear to reflect strong prior expectations that published findings are not reliable, and as such, do not constitute scientific output.
The field of social psychology can be improved, but not by the publication of negative findings. Experimenters should be encouraged to restrict their “degrees of freedom,” for example, by specifying designs in advance.
Whether they mean to or not, authors and editors of failed replications are publicly impugning the scientific integrity of their colleagues. Targets of failed replications are justifiably upset, particularly given the inadequate basis for replicators’ extraordinary claims.
This is why we can't have social science. Not because the subject is not amenable to the scientific method -- it obviously is. People are conducting controlled experiments and other people are attempting to replicate the results. So far, so good. Rather, the problem is that at least one celebrated authority in the field hates that, and would prefer much, much more deference to authority.
Obviously if you can control for a confounding factor then its not an issue, I was simply stressing that the nature of human sciences means that it is effectively impossible to control for all confounding factors, or even be aware of many of them.
To the extend that's true careful replication of studies to identify factors is important if you don't want to practice what Feymann described as Cargo Cult science. If you follow Feymann argument physicists also would get a bunch of bad results if they would work with the scientific standards used in psychology.
Feymann on rat psychology:
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did
Jason Mitchell is [edit: has been] the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard. He has won the National Academy of Science's Troland Award as well as the Association for Psychological Science's Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contribution.
Here, he argues against the principle of replicability of experiments in science. Apparently, it's disrespectful, and presumptively wrong.
This is why we can't have social science. Not because the subject is not amenable to the scientific method -- it obviously is. People are conducting controlled experiments and other people are attempting to replicate the results. So far, so good. Rather, the problem is that at least one celebrated authority in the field hates that, and would prefer much, much more deference to authority.