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from the basement-dwellers-getting-invites dept.
Here's some useful research from Royal Holloway, University of London's Department of Psychology:
Research published in the journal Psychological Science [DOI: 10.1177/0956797616661523] [DX] has shown that judgements of attractiveness vary depending on who is nearby, and how good-looking they are in comparison. A person will rank higher on a scale of attractiveness when compared alongside less attractive people, than they would when judged alone. Popular opinion points to a person's perceived level of attractiveness as somehow fixed. However, research from Royal Holloway, University of London shows that context is key to assessing attractiveness.
[...] Participants in the study were asked to rate pictures of different faces for attractiveness, one by one. They were then asked to assess the same faces, placed alongside ones perceived to be undesirable. When adding these 'distractor faces', the attractiveness of the same faces increased from the first round of ranking.
Participants were then shown two attractive faces, alongside a 'distractor' face and asked to judge between them. The presence of the less attractive face was found to make the viewers more critical between the attractive face, as Dr Furl explained: "The presence of a less attractive face does not just increase the attractiveness of a single person, but in a crowd could actually make us even more choosey! We found that the presence of a 'distractor' face makes differences between attractive people more obvious and that observers start to pull apart these differences, making them even more particular in their judgement."
The DUFF (2015). You may also be interested in this study suggested by Medical Daily:
Attractive Female Romantic Partners Provide a Proxy for Unobservable Male Qualities: The When and Why Behind Human Female Mate Choice Copying (open, DOI: 10.1177/1474704916652144) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @03:11PM
Here's an old article by Jared Diamond
Appeals to authority, false comparisons, and word games. If the social sciences were anywhere near as rigorous and reliable as mathematics, there would be no issues. Many social science studies can't even be replicated, and even though there are techniques that can help reduce the chance of errors and bias, oftentimes they are not used, used improperly, or only partially address the problem.
Should we really be laughing at people who are cautious of fields of science that have proven to be less reliable than some other fields of science? Whether the social sciences are easier or more difficult to do properly is completely irrelevant to how reliable they are.
The author also admits that operationalizing is "inevitably more difficult and less exact in the soft sciences", which seems to confirm what I've been saying.
and these can correct for things like people being untruthful
It may be possible that people lie about certain issues and not others; therefore, you would need to scientifically study which issues people will lie about and which they won't lie about.
In many ways, it's harder to do than for the "hard" sciences like mathematics and physics.
I'd say that's another reason to be cautious of the social sciences. It's also irrelevant to the overall quality of the fields in question. No one sensible would lower their standards of evidence simply because certain fields of science are harder to get right.