The question of whether social sciences are sciences is subtle to answer. If we take Francis Bacon's method as more or less what a science is, then, in order to be a science, we need to be able to do experiments. Experiments are objective (anybody can watch it happening), communicable (you can tell anybody how to do the experiment), and repeatable (anybody can do it).

An example would be something like chemistry. An experiment could be burning hydrogen with oxygen to see if it yielded water. There is a very strong sense in which anybody could do this same exact experiment. It is repeatable by anybody, it happens in an objective space we can all observe.

Now, take something like history (perhaps one of the social sciences). It's proverbial that history repeats itself, but can you do experiments in history? Not really, because you can't do something like rerun WWII, only this time the nazi's didn't chase out Einstein.

Note, this doesn't mean that History is bogus. Yes, it takes as its object of study something which you can't perform experiments on, but nevertheless, it does have other methods which are apropos to its subject matter, and it is a discipline--doing history is scholarship. It yields knowledge--just not scientific knowledge in the sense of the Baconian scientific method.

Economics is the same--we can't just re-run the Reagan era, only this time without trickle-down economics. If somebody is studying, say, the causes of the great depression, their subject matter isn't something which you can gain knowledge about using experiments. Doesn't mean you can't get economic knowledge in other ways.

So....what about Psychology? Specifically, somebody who studies...deception. Is deception something you gain knowledge about by doing experiments? If you take a group of people and try to deceive them, and study what happens, is that an experiment?

Its not, and for a very interesting reason: the "is-ought" distinction. Experiments can tell you the "is"--what is happening. But they can't tell you the "oughts"--what should be happening. In English, we use two different verb moods to mark the distinction, e.g. "Fred is not lying" vs "Fred should not be lying."

Now, you can perform experiments and observations to determine whether or not Fred is not telling the truth. But lying? Lying has an extra ingredient, the intention to deceive. Intentions are subjective and not observable in the same way that a chemistry experiment is. Very problematic from the standpoint of Baconian science.

But what is completely outside the scope of Baconian science is determining whether a sentence like "Fred should not be lying" is true. If Fred is hiding jews in the basement, should he lie to the stormtroopers at his front door? If he had an affair, but its over and he wants to stay happily married to his wife, should he lie to her if she asked him whether he had an affair?

There are no experiments--in the sense of yielding publicly observable and repeatable results--which will tell you this. Note, this doesn't mean that Psychology is bogus, any more than History is Bogus. It's just Psychology has as its subject matter, some phenomena which are not amenable to experiment. It used to develop methods--like psychoanalysis--which were more apropos to studying its subject matter.

But these days, it seems to be embarrassed about all that, and wants to be a "respectable" science. Instead of Freud theorizing about how childhood trauma affects adult moodiness, they do things like study whether or not prozac helps depression. Studying whether or not a drug can boost serotonin levels in the brain can be investigated scientifically, but in an important sense, it is changing the subject. We're not talking about humans anymore, we are talking about what chemicals do to neuron serotonin re-uptake.

So, what if you are an assistant professor, desperately trying to get some scientific results so you can get tenure? If you try to study something like "deception" scientifically---doing experiments on sophomores--you'll run up against the brute fact that your subject matter can't be studied scientifically. You can call what you are doing "experimenting", but any results you get will not be repeatable.

This is a problem if you are trying to get tenure. Psychology could have just said "hey, we are more like economics and history than we are like chemistry, so lets develop some methods appropriate to investigating our subject matter."

But no. What they did instead was just make up results, on what looks like a phenomenal scale. And its been going so long that we have generations of people who got their Ph.D. from somebody who cheated their way through. And even if they wanted not to cheat---they are competing with their peers who will happily cheat.

The result is sad stories like the OP. It's a vicious circle, a race to the bottom. Honesty is punished, deception is rewarded. The whole field has seriously lost its way. They need to get back to realizing that they are studying a subject matter which needs different methods than experimentation to study.