It's become a kind of sport to shoot down social science claims, whether it's the notion that you can ace interviews if you stand like Wonder Woman or charm your next date by reading two pages of "Moby-Dick" before you leave.
And now critics have taken aim at a prize target — a much-cited claim that symphony orchestras hire more women when they audition musicians behind a screen. There are big implications here, since the study has been used in diversity efforts across industries, which is why the takedown has taken off in the media.
But the blind auditions won't go the way of the other results that have vanished into air upon a more critical analysis. One reason is that blind auditions really exist; they were not a contrivance set up by scientists in a lab, as with the studies that have become infamous in the so-called replication crisis. Those mostly relied on experiments from which researchers made oversized and often counterintuitive claims. Some, it turned out, incorporated errors in statistical analysis that made random noise look like surprising new findings.