Do you believe your car grill says something meaningful about you? That a messy office means you are more likely to be racist? That some people have precognitive abilities?
Those are all peer-reviewed psychology papers and, because psychologists claim it is science, they have fed the growing distrust of science by the public. It isn't global warming or GMOs that polarize people the most, it's the 'social sciences'. Like political science or military science, those are not science at all, it is just a proper name, and when the science is just statistics placed into charts by academics who surveyed college undergraduates that either got paid or received extra credit (meaning they are psychology undergraduate students), the public gets weary.
That weariness bleeds over into other fields.
If scientists let social psychologists and sociologists call themselves 'scientists' maybe everyone is a scientist, the same way the term 'professional' has been colloquialized to mean 'anyone who does something as an occupation'
The problem? It's the same one the large open access journals all face; they get paid to publish studies, they hire people and have to cover costs. The 'peer review' becomes just an editor who looks over a paper and fills out a short form and, as long as the credit card clears, it gets called 'peer reviewed'.
Psychology already had lax standards for peer review - even the craziest fraud was not called out because none of these 'experiments' can be replicated - and now it will be even worse because there won't even be a pretense of peer review, it will be 'we will publish you if you pay'.
