Some questions to ponder: how is a record of behavior (the focus of behavioral science) any less objective than heart rate, pupil dilation, etc? Also, is heart rate a measure of psychological state really? Hormone levels are a mess as a measure of psychobehavioral state. EEGs are useful but are opaque in terms of underlying mechanisms.
People do use all the things you mention, and they're certainly useful, but also have limitations.
If you want to know how someone feels about liberal politics, for example (I'll let you pick the US or Britain), it's far easier and more direct to ask them than to try to infer it from heart rate responses etc.
I'm not saying those other things are useless, only that there's a reason Likert scales continue to be used so much.
Some food for thought from the other side of the coin:
In any event, my complaint about the piece is that it picks on the social sciences when biomedicine is ripe with corruption and irreproducibility itself. There's a kind of bullying that occurs with this; biomedicine is rife with problems so it takes them out on a scapegoat. (The social sciences do have many problems, but many of them apply equally well to other fields.)
Questionnaires are not records of behavior. They are records of questionnaire answers. Aggregates of subjective responses don't become objective.
A record of behavior would be something like Internet activity. Tech companies may be the first to capture enough behavioral data to be able to actually study psychology.
People do use all the things you mention, and they're certainly useful, but also have limitations.
If you want to know how someone feels about liberal politics, for example (I'll let you pick the US or Britain), it's far easier and more direct to ask them than to try to infer it from heart rate responses etc.
I'm not saying those other things are useless, only that there's a reason Likert scales continue to be used so much.
Some food for thought from the other side of the coin:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-negl...
In any event, my complaint about the piece is that it picks on the social sciences when biomedicine is ripe with corruption and irreproducibility itself. There's a kind of bullying that occurs with this; biomedicine is rife with problems so it takes them out on a scapegoat. (The social sciences do have many problems, but many of them apply equally well to other fields.)