User:Novem Linguae/Essays/Studies are not reliable

A "study" sounds very reliable, trustworthy, and authoritative. They're done by scientists and go through peer review. So that's reliable, right?

It's counter-intuitive, but single studies really aren't reliable. In fact, a lot of them are junk. There is something in science called the replication crisis. Someone will try to reproduce a study with the exact same conditions as the original, and will often get a completely different result. This is a huge red flag that the methodology of the original study was poor.

Being reproducible is a core tenet of empiricism and the scientific method. If a study is not reproducible, it likely suffered from poor methodology and its results are junk.

In the vast majority of cases, a single study is a starting point, not proof of anything. The results could be random chance, or the result of bias, or even outright fraud. Only once other researchers replicate the results can we consider a study persuasive. The more replications, the more reliable the results are. If attempts at replication fail, this can be a sign the original research was biased or incorrect.[1]