You may be assigning more intent than is necessary to explain the (very real) reproducibility problem in psych.

Not to belabor this but to note the irony here: there is probably a similar psychological (ehem) phenomenon that happens to a psyc grad student who lets their presumptions bleed into their interpretation of a measurement.

> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

R. Feynman