Can the Behavioral Sciences Self-Correct? A Social Epistemic Study

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. I show how long-run correction of error depends on the interaction between statistical inference methods and social conditions that affect every experiment: availability of resources (economic), experimenter biases (psychological), and accepted norms of publication (social norms). I argue that this interaction explains the "replicability crisis" in social psychology better than purely methodological explanations.