title: Can the behavioral sciences self-correct? A social epistemic study.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics, and Philosophy of Science, Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands. Electronic address: f.romero@uvt.nl.
authors.forename: Felipe
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Romero
keywords: Frequentist statistics; Replication; Scientific self-correction; Social epistemology; Social structure of science