I am not trying to bash psychology as a field, or say that it has no merit. However, this is much easier to do in the soft sciences than the hard ones. At the end of the day, unless you are talking about hard cognitive science, all psychology comes down to statistics based on comparatively small samples that are often difficult to reproduce because people are frankly funny creatures.

In the hard sciences, firm measurements are made of things that don’t change their minds. If someone cooks their books on something that draws any attention, another experiment or measurement or calculation will come out and show the fraud very quickly.