The social sciences face the problem of not having so many different possible angles, such as quantitative theories or even a clear idea of what is being tested. Much of the research is engaged in the collection of isolated factoids. Hopefully something like a quantitative theory will emerge, that allows these results to be connected together like a mesh network, but no new science gets there right away.
The other thing is, to be fair, social sciences have to deal with noisy data, and with ethics. There were things I could do to atoms in my experiments, such as deprive them of air and smash them to bits, that would not pass ethical review if performed on humans. ;-)
PBS Space time has an excellent video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72cM_E6bsOs
In physics, when a result raises more questions than it answers, we call it "job security." ;-)
No, it isn't. It looked at a few different fields, and found that the problem was actually worse for general science papers published in Nature/Science, where non-reproducible papers were cited 300 times more often as reproducible ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena
It's interesting that according to the Wikipedia article it's not entirely certain whether the radiation is producing actual light or just the sensation of light.
But one other thing to note here is that these headlines about a "replication crisis" seems to imply that this is a new phenomenon. Let's not forget the history of the electron charge. As Feynman said:
"We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.2...