Can the behavioral sciences self-correct? A social epistemic study

- I present a social epistemological study of “the self-corrective thesis” (SCT).
- Using computer simulations, I show that SCT is true only in a scientific utopia.
- Social aspects drastically affect the estimation of effect sizes in experiments.
- Critiques to classical statistics apply in some social structures but not others.
- Methodological explanations of the replicability crisis in psychology are limited.

Advocates of the self-corrective thesis argue that scientific method will refute false theories and find closer approximations to the truth in the long run. I discuss a contemporary interpretation of this thesis in terms of frequentist statistics in the context of the behavioral sciences. First, I identify experimental replications and systematic aggregation of evidence (meta-analysis) as the self-corrective mechanism. Then, I present a computer simulation study of scientific communities that implement this mechanism to argue that frequentist statistics may converge upon a correct estimate or not depending on the social structure of the community that uses it. Based on this study, I argue that methodological explanations of the “replicability crisis” in psychology are limited and propose an alternative explanation in terms of biases. Finally, I conclude suggesting that scientific self-correction should be understood as an interaction effect between inference methods and social structures.