Discussions about the replicability of psychological studies have primarily focused on improving research methods and practices, with less attention paid to the role of well-specified theories in facilitating the production of reliable empirical results. The field is currently in need of clearly articulated steps to theory specification and development, particularly regarding frameworks that may generalize across different fields of psychology. Here we focus on two approaches to theory specification and development that are typically associated with distinct research traditions: computational modeling and construct validation. We outline the points of convergence and divergence between them to illuminate the anatomy of a scientific theory in psychology—what a well-specified theory should contain and how it should be interrogated and revised through iterative theory-development processes. We propose how these two approaches can be used in complementary ways to increase the quality of explanations and the precision of predictions offered by psychological theories.

关于心理学研究的可复制性的讨论主要集中在改进研究方法和实践上，较少关注特定理论在促进产生可靠的实证结果方面的作用。该领域目前需要清晰明确的理论规范和发展步骤，特别是关于可以概括跨心理学不同领域的框架。在这里，我们关注两种通常与不同研究传统相关的理论规范和发展方法：计算建模和构造验证。我们概述了它们之间的收敛点和分歧点，以阐明心理学科学理论的解剖结构——一个明确规定的理论应该包含什么，以及应该如何通过迭代的理论发展过程对其进行询问和修改。我们建议如何以互补的方式使用这两种方法，以提高心理学理论提供的解释质量和预测精度。