Is psychology vague? Pyschologycels about the Replication Crisis

It's less vague than sociology

Even psychologycels dunk on sociologycels

Psychology is actually an extremely rigorous science, it's usually often more specific and rigorous than other fields of research because we're measuring intangible things such as personality traits and feelings and our subjects are real people. This means we have to consistently go above and beyond to prove things and take into consideration ethics at every step in the study design process.

"Rigorous" is a charitable term when replicability rates in social psychology are roughly 20-30% and in cognitive psychology are approach 50%

I also question the premise whether there is some more methodological rigor because of studying intangible things. That may be the case for those who study measurement and psychometrics, like personality psychologists. But there are an astounding number of psychology papers using unreliable and non valid measures to study intangible constructs which is part of the replicability crisis: the field is not more rigorous by virtue of studying something complex if it often doesn't do it well and many don't care about valid measurement

I'm very skeptical that this is a psychology problem, rather than a "science is hard" problem. To my knowledge very few fields have undertaken reproducibility studies to the extent that psychology has (but if I'm mistaken very happy to be proven otherwise!). So just because replication rates look bad for psychology doesn't mean it is less rigorous than other sciences.

Once example I'm aware of: A replicability project for cancer biology replicated 40% of the original effects https://www.cos.io/rpcb

!ifrickinglovescience !physics !biology how's the Replication Crisis affecting you guys?

https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/comments/1clwb0d/is_there_a_replication_crisis_still_2023_and_2024/

The replication "crisis" is part of the nature of statistical testing. Read "the nature of p." All branches of science have a replication "crisis" and medicine was once of the first to angst over it, not psych.

Do you have an author or link for "the nature of p"?

Not off the top of my head, but this touches on the same issues. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-018-0421-4

https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.2698

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/opinion/psychology-is-not-in-crisis.html

The basic idea is that a failure to reproduce doesn't mean the theory is wrong, and reproduction doesn't mean it is right. It just changes our perception of the strength of the effect and should motivate us to consider the likelihood that the effect is influenced by unexplored boundary conditions or moderators. We have learned so much and are able to do so many more things these days. Seems odd to say the field is in a crisis. It is like watching a bmw owner drive his car to the junk yard because the engine's timing is off and demand they crush it into a cube.