Did not Feynman use rat experiments in his book to lay heavily into social studies? As i recall in the book, there was only one guy whose rat/mouse experiments had enough rigour, eliminating data disturbing experiment influences, systematically.
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.
For all the attempts to measure stuff and be "scientific", businesses mostly run on gut feelings, even when they're doing "experiments" or "collecting data in order to make informed decisions" or whatever. Often it's really easy to spot problems with these processes, but no-one cares as long as the PowerPoint slides say what they want them to say and pretend to be backed by data.
I've seen this described as "decision-based evidence-making".
A paper found that in order to prevent rats cheating the floor needed to have sand to prevent them picking up on vibrations. The result should've been that experiments began incorporating this measure in their own setups, but instead the paper went ignored
The paper: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1939-01955-001
Amusingly this VR direction could also be a useful method to limit the rat's perceptions to the experiment. But first it'd need to have the rat trained to explore a 3d environment & be fed by collecting food in the 3d environment
Run a filter for a situation and a query against a behavioural database at Amazon, Google, FB and you can build quite a nice insight into humanity.
Papers published with largest knowledge on humanity on earth : 0