It's probably because they can use the in-group primitives of the field to construct internally-consistent conclusions that are obviously false or silly to both casual observers and people who try to reproduce them systematically

if the social sciences held themselves to the standard of the hard sciences this problem couldn't exist

I feel like if social sciences held themselves to that standard we'd end up with eugenics? There's some inherit benefit to recognizing that social sciences aren't strictly 'hard-logic' sciences.