Guest post by Quan-Hoang Vuong of Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Research, Western University Hanoi, Vietnam
A growing awareness of the lack of reproducibility has undermined society’s trust and esteem in social sciences. In some cases, well-known results have been fabricated or the underlying data have turned out to have weak technical foundations.
{credit}Quan Hoang Vuong{/credit}
Many researchers have investigated the plausibility of findings in the social sciences and humanities. A typical example is the mysterious Critical Minimum Positivity Ratio 2.9013 by Fredrickson and Losada (2005), which claimed to show that there exists such a positivity ratio and that “an individual’s degree of flourishing could be predicted by that person’s ratio of positive to negative emotions over time”. This ratio had once been a well-known, highly influential and greatly admired psychological “constant” until it was shown by Brown, Sokal and Friedman (2013) to be an unfounded, arbitrary and meaningless number.
To address the plausibility problem, I suggest that a combination of open data, open peer-review and open community dialogue, could serve as a feasible option for the social sciences.