Earlier quoted context omitted.
The moral of that story, IMO, is not "don't do experiments with rodents" or even "bio/psych is nonsense." Instead, the point is that a good scientist has to aggressively consider possible explanations for your data and possible experimental confounds. This is much, much harder when studying subjects that have some agency of their own, like rats or humans.
It gets even worse outside of science. I'm sure most people who've been in the business world long have noticed that attempts to eliminate confounding factors when drawing conclusions are rarely even attempted unless the results contradict what the highest-on-the-org-chart interested party wants it to be (and even then, they're usually just ignored rather than any attack on their validity actually being made). For al…
I've seen this described as "decision-based evidence-making".