Very true. But this means more statistics and controls are necessary to get solid result from a social science experiment then a particle physics experiment, no? Clearly, this is practically impossible, but there you go.
No it's not? You put more money into the studies and you can do bigger, better versions of them.
A major obstacle to putting more money into studies: people jerking themselves off about how soft sciences are a joke and hard sciences are Super Serious Business.
One example is the famous reluctance to publish negative results in psychology. Nearly all published results in (collider) particle physics are negative.
If senior faculty prefer to only hire people with a string of published postive findings, you are literally encouraging p-hacking. Again, they are not "bad" people, it is just that the system the senior people have setup in that field is not conducive to doing good science.
Because it'd be good to understand what makes people happy, for example. Or what enables relationships to thrive. Or when different forms of government are suitable or unsuitable to solve a set of problems, etc.
Sorry to break it to the hard-sciencers, but the vast majority of opportunities left in the western world to improve people's lives is not particle accelerators, it's answering questions like: "what actually helps people feel satisfied in life, loved in their relationships, and belonging in their community?"
> At least a large part of the problem is cultural
Is it? Why so?
Negative results aren't published in almost any field, and that's actually a good on ramp to the discussion we should be having, which is about the broken incentives of science and scientific publishing specifically. The broken incentive model isn't special to softer sciences and it has far more dire consequences in other domains.
You can't possibly think that soft sciences are the only ones hiring people with a string of positive results... right?
This question is orthogonal to the question of whether the organizations currently conducting research in those areas are well-organized. You could fund them well and also demand re-organization as a condition. You could even find other scientists to do this work. But if you don't think the work is important, none of this matters.
