Were proactive COVID-19 policies the key to success?

By Kent R. Kroeger (February 11, 2021)

There is no weenier way of copping out in data journalism (and social science more broadly) than posing a question in an article’s headline.

This intellectual timidity probably stems from the fact that most peer-reviewed, published social science research findings are irreproducible. In other words, social science research findings are more likely a function of bias and methodology than a function of reality itself.

As my father, a mechanical engineer, would often say: “Social science is not science.”

The consequence is that social science findings are too often artifacts of their methods and temporal context — so much so that a field like psychology has become a graveyard for old, discredited theories: Physiognomy (i.e., assessing personality traits through facial characteristics), graphology (i.e., assessing personality traits through handwriting), primal therapy (i.e., psychotherapy method where patients re-experience childhood pains), and neuro-linguistic programming (i.e., reprogramming behavioral patterns through language) are just a few embarrassing examples.

Indeed, established psychological theories such as cognitive dissonance have proven to be such an over-simplification of behavioral reality that their…