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Paul Meehl is responsible for what is probably the most apt explanation for why some areas of science have made more progress than others over the last 70 years or so. Amazingly, he pointed this out in 1967 and it had seemingly no effect on standard practices:
Because physical theories typically predict numerical values, an improvement in ex-perimental precision reduces the tolerance range and hence increases corroborability. In most psychological research, improved power of a statistical design leads to a prior probability approaching ½ of finding a significant difference in the theoretically predicted direction. Hence the corroboration yielded by "success" is very weak, and becomes weaker with increased precision. "Statistical significance" plays a logical role in psychology precisely the reverse of its role in physics. This problem is worsened by certain unhealthy tendencies prevalent among psychologists, such as a premium placed on experimental "cuteness" and a free reliance upon ad hoc explanations to avoid refuation.
Meehl, Paul E. (1967). "Theory-Testing in Psychology and Physics: A Methodological Paradox" (PDF). Philosophy of Science 34 (2): 103–115.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1086%2F288135 . Free here: http://cerco.ups-tlse.fr/pdf0609/Meehl_1967.pdf
There are many science articles posted to this site that fall foul of his critique probably because researchers are not aware of it. In short, this (putatively fatally flawed) research attempts to disprove a null hypothesis rather than a research hypothesis. Videos of some of his lectures are available online:
http://www.psych.umn.edu/meehlvideos.php
Session 7 starting at ~1hr is especially good.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2016, @11:41PM
You can get "reverse" p-hacking, where anomalies (with respect to the research hypothesis or theory) are explained away by adding more and more sources of error as well. Check out the literature on the pioneer anomaly for example (not saying they are wrong in the explanations, just that you could keep adding sources of uncertainty until no result is significantly deviating from the prediction): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly [wikipedia.org]