This is purely anecdotal, but he looks the stereotype of a villain and I always had a hard time taking him seriously because of it.

He literally looks like the devil in Rick and Morty. There's some other classic villains I'm sure are a more apt comparison but I can't think of any at the moment. https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Lucius_Needful

Anyone who goes all around talking about one thing that they did back in the 70s the way he does is hard to take seriously. That and anytime he's interviewed on the subject he'll be very clear that 'attempting to do his study anywhere on Earth would be impossible now'. Brings to mind how Jerry Seinfeld would never race anyone after he beat the fast kid decades earlier[0].

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akANwligs2E

Would it not be? Which IRB would allow it?

> doesn't qualify as any sort of actual science.

That could be said about plenty of psychologists and sociologists. I hate that the general public thinks of the social sciences on the same level as other branches of science.

It is an ongoing problem with psychology. Psychology desperately wants to be a real science, and puts a lot of effort into teaching and emphasising the scientific method, statistics, etc, to the point that most of the emphasis on the scientific method came from my psychology classes, but somehow the people who choose psychology as their field of research seem to be more interested in spectacular results than in proper science. Psychology's history is steeped in unscientific thinking and elevating hypothesis to theory without proper scientific rigor, and it's struggling to free itself from that history. Keeping experiments like this in high regard is part of the problem.