Unfortunately, as it is practiced, this IS what CBT ends up being a good deal of the time. CBT has an implicit, and sometimes explicit, mechanistic view of human nature. This can come off as extremely judgmental to vulnerable and intelligent clients. Other approaches, like Motivational Interviewing, adopt a neutral stance that offers the potential for clients to actually explore their feelings instead of just getting rid of them.
Edit: re-reading my comment, I think I am coming off too hard on CBT. There are real reasons why clients can come out of CBT thinking the therapist is trying to find what is twisted with them or having them fill out pointless booklets - this does not completely undercut what CBT is about. There is good working going on to combine CBT with Motivational Interviewing to improve treatment of depression and suicidality.
> social science is either unreproducible, vague, mixing correlation with causation, uses dependent variables, poorly reasoned, statistical quirks, pushed by agendas or fundamentally flawed...
Dr. Freud would have had a good deal to say about your apparent fixation with bovine feces...
Seriously though, your comments are playing fast and lose with a range of fields that you’re conflating and dismissing. Not all social sciences are “soft” and many have empirically-based real world applications that shape your (and everyone’s really) everyday lives.
They did two experiments that conceptually replicate research in the area. I agree that results like these need to be replicated by other researchers, but chalking this up to measurement or design error is not the most likely explanation.