ArticlePerspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science2021
Why Hypothesis Testers Should Spend Less Time Testing Hypotheses.
Article in Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
82 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
- Reproducibility in biomedical research.Nature medicine · 2026Review
- Re-Envisioning Clinical Science Training: Open Science as One of Many Important Steps.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2026Article
- How do my distributions differ? significance testing for the overlapping index using permutation tests.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Article
- To Be FAIR: Theory Specification Needs an Update.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2026Article
- Editorial Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2026Article
- Spatial encoding of a traumatic virtual reality scene reduces intrusive memories.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Developmental frameworks, what have you done for me lately?Development and psychopathology · 2025Article
- The effects of contextual diversity on lexical processing: A scoping review.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Improving statistical reporting in psychology.Communications psychology · 2025Review
- Upright and inverted unfamiliar face-matching tasks - everything correlates everywhere all at once.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Estimating the Replicability of Sports and Exercise Science Research.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2025Article
- Reflections on Conducting a Large Replication Project in Sports and Exercise Science.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2025Review
- A Participatory Survey to Investigate the Long-Term Effectiveness of Adult Psychiatric Services (PSILEAPS): Baseline Data and Recruitment Experiences.Community mental health journal · 2025Article
- From real-time measures to real world differences: New [and old] statistical approaches to individual differences in real-time language processing.Brain research · 2025Review
- Assessment of Hope in Pediatric Oncology: Development, Content and Face Validation of a Parental Questionnaire.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2025Article
- Is Countermovement Jump Height and One Repetition Maximum Back Squat Associated With the Peak Force of a Front Kick With and Without Carried Load?Journal of strength and conditioning research · 2025Article
- Zooming in on what counts as core and auxiliary: A case study on recognition models of visual working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
22 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
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
For almost half a century, Paul Meehl educated psychologists about how the mindless use of null-hypothesis significance tests made research on theories in the social sciences basically uninterpretable. In response to the replication crisis, reforms in psychology have focused on formalizing procedures for testing hypotheses. These reforms were necessary and influential. However, as an unexpected consequence, psychological scientists have begun to realize that they may not be ready to test hypotheses. Forcing researchers to prematurely test hypotheses before they have established a sound "derivation chain" between test and theory is counterproductive. Instead, various nonconfirmatory research activities should be used to obtain the inputs necessary to make hypothesis tests informative. Before testing hypotheses, researchers should spend more time forming concepts, developing valid measures, establishing the causal relationships between concepts and the functional form of those relationships, and identifying boundary conditions and auxiliary assumptions. Providing these inputs should be recognized and incentivized as a crucial goal in itself. In this article, we discuss how shifting the focus to nonconfirmatory research can tie together many loose ends of psychology's reform movement and help us to develop strong, testable theories, as Paul Meehl urged.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What 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.