The Occam’s Razor explanation for this is that the popular narratives are popular because most available evidence supports them.
That seems like a bit of abuse of Occam's razor. Narratives are popularized by the general media, not scientists. Just compare how popular the idea that IQ is meaningless and not heritable is amongst the general population and the media compared to those who actually study the topic full time at universities.
Universities and people in them are not immune to pressure. Wasn't Hsu fired partly because he funded research into police shootings that ended up getting a politically incorrect result?
Authors of unpopular results (Rind et al anyone?) often get attacked a lot, their research subject to a disproportionate level of scrutiny and it's very career limitting (or is at least rumoured to be, which is plenty of a chilling effect).
Cesario and Johnson studied fatal shootings by police. Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings. That was only a small part of the case the graduate employee union presented against Hsu. The letter started by faculty[1] didn't mention it at all.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jb7w02E5GAdrJ_QnAokp7Ier...
I don't want to get too down into the weeds as my point is that people and the media have a big influence on what science gets done and what is career limitting. That said:
Most of the "case" was nonesense, with the actual letter (which had a fraction of the signatures of the counter-letter) being mostly guilt by association.
> Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings.
It was relevant because Floy was a police killing. Racial bias in police killings (the vast majority are with guns) was the main thing the protestors I've heard were protesting.
Only a small fraction of the signatures supporting Hsu have any affiliation with his university. And would you care which petition had more signatures if it was the other way around?
The protesters' demands for equity and police accountability aren't limited to fatal shootings or even all killings.
The file-drawer effect is real and multifaceted, including political narrative strategy. If you don't think that editors consider this aspect of maintaining their journals' reputations, you are simply naive.
Note, when looking at this literature: there is a huge publication bias. Publishing a paper that fits the popular (in social sciences) narratives is easy, publishing one that goes against them (like the one I linked) is hard and may well be career suicide. Also, the bar for what constitutes good enough science in these areas is very low.