Only about half Of social science results can be replicated, finds new study

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/only...00373.html

INTRO: A major, new examination of the replicability and reliability of published social and behavioral science experiments has found that only about half of previously published results can be replicated by new studies.

That’s one of the main conclusions from the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) project, which involved an analysis of thousands of scientific studies published in 62 different journals between 2009 and 2018. The large-scale, international project was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The reanalyses focused on research in the fields of criminology, economics, educational science, health sciences, leadership, marketing, organizational behaviour, psychology, political science, public administration and sociology. The results are contained in three papers published this week in the highly respected journal Nature... (MORE - details)

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10203-5

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09844-9

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-10078-y
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COMMENT: But it's not like the humanities truly need reliable science research to complement, undergird, bolster or legitimize their theories and communal prescriptions. Politics, managerial policymakers, institutions, and appearance-conscious industries slash businesses exploitative of do-gooderism have been more than willing to accept such at face value. "It sounds noble."
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Can we trust the social sciences shaping our lives?
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1124540

INTRO: Published in Nature, this scientific scrutiny led by Abel Brodeur, a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa, came alongside a massive seven-year international project assessing whether studies held up over time, particularly those without a universal scientific score. That study – the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) project – reviewed nearly 4,000 social-science papers to find researchers couldn’t replicate the results in half of the studies they tested.

Brodeur’s work, however, provided more encouraging results. Brodeur employed a dual strategy. His team scrutinized papers at single-day events between 2022 and 2023. He ultimately reviewed 110 articles to discover 85 percent were computationally reproducible, an encouraging score amid a burgeoning climate of public distrust in scientific findings.

“We now have systematic, large-scale evidence on how reliable social science research really is,” explains Brodeur, founder of the Institute for Replication at the University of Ottawa. “The direct impact of this will see encouragement for higher research standards like better coding, data sharing, and general transparency so errors can be identified before they influence policy. Indirect impacts should lead to an improvement of trust in science by showing transparency and self-correction to help policymakers rely on more robust evidence.” (MORE - details, no ads)