Wow, this is quite the read on scientific canon based on experiments and studies that cannot be reliably reproduced.
I hope the student who asked "How do we know that's true?" ended up with an A.

Social science has a replication problem — a new massive study found that only half of published findings hold up when researchers try to repeat them and many that made it into textbooks
It didn’t start with a paper. It started with a classroom. I was teaching a unit on classic social psychology — the foundational studies that most of us in the field absorbed as canonical truth. Milgram’s obedience experiments. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Baumeister’s work on ego depletion, the idea that willpower is a depletable resource […]