I posted a comment about this, but I think it's worthy of a post. I will summarize very briefly.
In 1973, David Rosenhan, a psychologist, published a study of mental institutions that basically went viral. In "On Being Sane in Insane Places" Rosenhan claimed to have sent 12 average people to voluntarily be assessed by different mental institutions. He catalogued the diagnoses they received and how long they spent institutionalized. This study was shocking in purporting to show how poorly diagnoses work and in exposing flaws in treatment. His claims, followed in 1975 by the famous movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest essentially killed off institutionalization in the United States and around the world. Those who supported chemically treatments, as opposed to psychotherapy and hospitalization, won a resounding victory, and that's the world we live in today.
The only problem is, Rosenhan's paper was a complete work of fiction, and he lied repeatedly about the experiment, about the results of the experiment, even about the people in the experiment. Rosenhan, himself was one of the participants, and the alleged experimental protocols that participants were supposed to follow simply did not exist. When experiences didn't match what he was looking for, he simply dismissed and ignored them, and made up 'alternative facts' instead.
Investigative reporter Susannah Calahan and history of psychiatry professor Andrew Scull have thoroughly destroyed Rosenhan's paper and results, and yet it is still the most formative and influential piece of work in the field in at least the last 75 years.
Andrew Scull's lengthy article. I highly recommend reading it all:
https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/schizophrenia/rosenhan/2023-scull.pdf
Archive: https://archive.is/fqt8z
This needs to be more widely known. Along with the perverted Kinsey (enough said) and the fraudster Ancel Keys, of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, whose work lead directly to the false belief that "all fat is bad" and who is personally responsible for the high-carb low-fat diet trends of the 1960s on that have killed hundreds of millions, it shows the power that corrupt, fraudulent, and narrative-driven activist scientists can have on reshaping society around us.
No, we should NOT "trust the science," and to say otherwise is distinctly anti-scientific.
One of the other seminal "studies" in psychology is also a fraud, the so called Stanford prison experiment.
There is a perverse incentive to publish fake papers today. All the people running around with Ph.D doctorates need to publish to get hired, and promoted, so what do they do? Make shit up.
If there weren't so many midwit Ph.D around, there wouldn't be such high pressure to publish fake studies for career enhancement. How to fix that? Fewer colleges, fewer people in college, and much higher admission standards so that the people who are in college are able to properly advance the field of knowledge they go into.
I wouldn't say the Stanford prison experiment is fake as much as it was uncontrolled and abusive.
It was fake in the sense that it wasn't really an experiment. There was no control group. I think the guy that set it up even calls it a "demonstration" rather than an experiment. He set it up in a way that virtually guaranteed the result.
Even the complaints from the victims basically made it seem like that. Also the guards kinda said that too. Like they were pressured to be crazy.