> Why does strict falsifiability not work in social sciences? Theories in physics provide specific numerical predictions. Theories in social psychology provide

> Why does strict falsifiability not work in social sciences? Theories in physics provide specific numerical predictions. Theories in social psychology provide predictions like 'X is correlated with Y' which is very difficult to falsify because in practice everything is correlated with everything else to some degree. Null hypothesis significance testing is not the same as Popperian falsification either - it attempts to falsify the null hypothesis rather than the theory in question, and in the social sciences the null hypothesis is almost never strictly true. Meehl was talking about this as far back as 1990: > Null hypothesis testing of correlational predictions from weak substantive theories in soft psychology is subject to the influence of ten obfuscating factors whose effects are usually (1) sizeable, (2) opposed, (3) variable, and (4) unknown https://meehl.dl.umn.edu/sites/g/files/pua1696/f/144whysummaries.pdf https://meehl.dl.umn.edu/sites/g/files/pua1696/f/144whysumma... The consensus among folk who care about the problem seems to be that we should move from significance testing to predicting and estimating effect sizes. And then of course on top of that we still have to deal with publication bias, HARKing, researcher degrees of freedom etc.