politics

I have a hypothesis that this phenomena of science types overestimating their ability to draw conclusions in the social sciences is a result of STEM-y people persistently being told they are smart for being relatively competent with more concrete subjects, making them far less likely to negatively assess their understanding of the more squishy world.

This is absolutely 100% a thing. I'm a software dev and every other colleague is like this to some extent, they'll make the most puddle-deep analysis of a societal problem backed up by nothing but their personal biases and think they're fucking sociological geniuses.