ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2019
Addressing the theory crisis in psychology.
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 117 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
117 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Do Salient Social Norms Moderate Mortality Salience Effects? A (Challenging) Meta-Analysis of Terror Management Studies.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2023Pooled it
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- Analytical Robustness and Competing Interpretations in Violent Video Game Research: A Response to Teng and Bushman's (2026) Reanalysis of Lacko et al. (2024).Aggressive behavior · 2026Article
- Analyzing multidimensional formal dynamic models in psychology: A tutorial using graphical tools.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- A tutorial on causal network simulation and exploration using the causalnet R package.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Modelling non-linear psychological processes: Reviewing and evaluating non-parametric approaches and their applicability to intensive longitudinal data.The British journal of mathematical and statistical psychology · 2026Review
- Article
- Restricting facial mimicry does not impair emotion recognition or influence the evaluation of human affect vocalizations and instrumental sounds.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Open science practices in personality disorder journals.Personality disorders · 2026Article
- To Be FAIR: Theory Specification Needs an Update.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2026Article
- Bias in Structural MRI Correlates of Delay Discounting due to Head Motion.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- The cognitive anchor system: a structural model of self, task selection, and latent intention in human cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Linguistic diversity and theory in psychological science.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- How much less is enough? A reflexive perspective on the theory of simplified information processing by Voigt et al. (2025).Frontiers in sociology · 2026Article
- How objects become psychologically available: in-itself information and informational mediation for theoretical psychology.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- What are we really measuring? The semantic confound in psychological scales and the case for theory-driven measurement.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- What is critical metascience and why is it important?Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Toward a paradox-oriented paradigm of knowing: the form theory of observation and quality in empirical sciences.Frontiers in sociology · 2026Review
- Self-disclosure dynamics in psychological crisis among Chinese pediatric patients with severe nocturnal enuresis: A qualitative inquiry.Journal of family medicine and primary care · 2025Article
57 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A worrying number of psychological findings are not replicable. Diagnoses of the causes of this "replication crisis," and recommendations to address it, have nearly exclusively focused on methods of data collection, analysis, and reporting. We argue that a further cause of poor replicability is the often weak logical link between theories and their empirical tests. We propose a distinction between discovery-oriented and theory-testing research. In discovery-oriented research, theories do not strongly imply hypotheses by which they can be tested, but rather define a search space for the discovery of effects that would support them. Failures to find these effects do not question the theory. This endeavor necessarily engenders a high risk of Type I errors-that is, publication of findings that will not replicate. Theory-testing research, by contrast, relies on theories that strongly imply hypotheses, such that disconfirmation of the hypothesis provides evidence against the theory. Theory-testing research engenders a smaller risk of Type I errors. A strong link between theories and hypotheses is best achieved by formalizing theories as computational models. We critically revisit recommendations for addressing the "replication crisis," including the proposal to distinguish exploratory from confirmatory research, and the preregistration of hypotheses and analysis plans.
Indexed as
Identifiers
31515732What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.