Reproducibility plagues all scientific fields. You are singling out the one - psychology - that actually tried to measure the problem and do something about it (in the form of new requirements for publishing such as pre-registrations, mandatory reporting of exact p values and effect sizes and confidence intervals, access to original experimental materials and so forth). To say "most of psychology is not reproducible" is correct only by the strictest possible criterion of "most": 39% of the studies did replicate and 47% of the effects were within 95% of the original effect.
Other fields, like cancer biology (biology being much closer to "a real science" probably by your criteria) won't even cooperate with replication attempts, see this:
"First, many original papers failed to report key descriptive and inferential statistics: the data needed to compute effect sizes and conduct power analyses was publicly accessible for just 4 of 193 experiments. Moreover, despite contacting the authors of the original papers, we were unable to obtain these data for 68% of the experiments. Second, none of the 193 experiments were described in sufficient detail in the original paper to enable us to design protocols to repeat the experiments, so we had to seek clarifications from the original authors. While authors were extremely or very helpful for 41% of experiments, they were minimally helpful for 9% of experiments, and not at all helpful (or did not respond to us) for 32% of experiments. Third, once experimental work started, 67% of the peer-reviewed protocols required modifications to complete the research and just 41% of those modifications could be implemented."
My field (social psychology) at least keeps track of such things and mostly cooperates.
Lastly, if you actually follow research in particle physics (which I did for a while as I was close to a bunch of people at Caltech working on this) you will know their experiments don't replicate all the time.
Generalizations about the 'soft" vs "hard" sciences are easy to throw around. Following the actual details of the various reproducibility issues and attempts to quantify and address them, less so.
A phenomenal, germane read: _The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics_ (https://amzn.to/3q6PzMW). It is tangential but helps explain why the proverbial elite—whether political, cultural, or pedagogical—remain in power despite abhorrent behavior and gross misdeeds.
Reproducibility plagues all scientific fields. You are singling out the one - psychology - that actually tried to measure the problem and do something about it (in the form of new requirements for publishing such as pre-registrations, mandatory reporting of exact p values and effect sizes and confidence intervals, access to original experimental materials and so forth). To say "most of psychology is not reproducible" is correct only by the strictest possible criterion of "most": 39% of the studies did replicate and 47% of the effects were within 95% of the original effect.
Other fields, like cancer biology (biology being much closer to "a real science" probably by your criteria) won't even cooperate with replication attempts, see this:
https://www.cos.io/rpcb
and
https://elifesciences.org/articles/67995
"First, many original papers failed to report key descriptive and inferential statistics: the data needed to compute effect sizes and conduct power analyses was publicly accessible for just 4 of 193 experiments. Moreover, despite contacting the authors of the original papers, we were unable to obtain these data for 68% of the experiments. Second, none of the 193 experiments were described in sufficient detail in the original paper to enable us to design protocols to repeat the experiments, so we had to seek clarifications from the original authors. While authors were extremely or very helpful for 41% of experiments, they were minimally helpful for 9% of experiments, and not at all helpful (or did not respond to us) for 32% of experiments. Third, once experimental work started, 67% of the peer-reviewed protocols required modifications to complete the research and just 41% of those modifications could be implemented."
My field (social psychology) at least keeps track of such things and mostly cooperates.
Lastly, if you actually follow research in particle physics (which I did for a while as I was close to a bunch of people at Caltech working on this) you will know their experiments don't replicate all the time.
Generalizations about the 'soft" vs "hard" sciences are easy to throw around. Following the actual details of the various reproducibility issues and attempts to quantify and address them, less so.
A phenomenal, germane read: _The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics_ (https://amzn.to/3q6PzMW). It is tangential but helps explain why the proverbial elite—whether political, cultural, or pedagogical—remain in power despite abhorrent behavior and gross misdeeds.
They don't teach the food pyramid anymore. So maybe change does happen?
Erik - there is a one line solution to this problem. You will be surprised how simple the eventual answer is!