> I would take it even farther and claim that very little in experimental psychology / sociology has any value whatsoever.

You are right, probably. I'm not exactly sure, because "top papers" like Standford Prison Experiment, are at the top for reasons that seems to me arbitrary and far away from a science. There are a lot of very good articles, some authors are really dig into their problems. Though these are not known for a public. They do not make good headlines. It is really annoying, because basically all popular psychology is a junk-science or have nothing to do with a science at all.

But in any case we can agree that there are a lot of papers with little to no value. And as I see it is because psychology and sociology are on the quest of creating the Method. The Method of research that works in their discipline. They do better now, then it was before. Now a paper like Zimbardo's wouldn't stand a chance. Papers from 30 years ago probably wouldn't seem rigorous enough now. The Method is becoming better, and probably it will become even better in a future and today's research will be deemed not good enough to be science, and will be read by undergraduates as a cautionary tale how one mustn't do Science.

It is a little like programming which changes with each passing decade, though a little slower, I'd guess. But socially it is different. I mean if we look not at results of research but on a social processes leading to this result, it is different from programming. Programmers are expected to create programs that work, they need to deliver. There is a final clear criterion of a success. Psychologists do not have such a criterion. They seek Truth, but what Truth is and what isn't is debatable. And they work for grants, not for revenue. Programmers are inventing new tools and techniques allowing to create better or more complex programs, but at the same time they also need to deliver something useful for non-programmers. Psychologists are inventing new tools and techniques of research (or sharpen old ones), but they do not feel the urge to deliver something to non-researchers. And to be honest oftentimes they are unable to deliver. They can find some grain of truth, but no one can find a practical application for this grain yet.

I think it will get better when neuroscience, AI, and psychology converge and some kind of a psychological theory will emerge. They are doing it now, and they are bound to collide at some point in a future. There are lots of psychology theories now, but no physicist will agree that any of them deserves to be called a theory. They are more like vague descriptions than theories. Or they are talk about some small part of mind.

I cannot say about prospects of sociology because I know little about it, but I'd say it would take more time to bring sociology to a high standards of an empirical science.

> Trying to correlate the delay between eating a marshmellow as a child and income as an adult is ridiculous, yet collectively we have spent untold money and time on tenured professors, conferences, papers, and pop psychology books about such things. Another example is Power Posing. How Amy Cuddy still gets employment is a mystery.

May be it is ridiculous. But if we want to know how human mind works, we better pay for it. Researchers played with electricity for centuries. Michael Faraday himself spent half a century designing experiments. All that didn't deliver nothing of a real practical value. But then James Clerk Maxwell published his equations. And suddenly electricity started to deliver. Electricity delivered probably more than any other technology.