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.