Practicality was a valued attribute of academic psychological theory during its initial decades, but usefulness has since faded in importance to the field. Theories are now evaluated mainly on their ability to account for decontextualized laboratory data and not their ability to help solve societal problems. With laudable exceptions in the clinical, intergroup, and health domains, most psychological theories have little relevance to people’s everyday lives, poor accessibility to policymakers, or even applicability to the work of other academics who are better positioned to translate the theories to the practical realm. We refer to the lack of relevance, accessibility, and applicability of psychological theory to the rest of society as the practicality crisis. The practicality crisis harms the field in its ability to attract the next generation of scholars and maintain viability at the national level. We describe practical theory and illustrate its use in the field of self-regulation. Psychological theory is historically and scientifically well positioned to become useful should scholars in the field decide to value practicality. We offer a set of incentives to encourage the return of social psychology to the Lewinian vision of a useful science that speaks to pressing social issues.

在最初的几十年里，实用性是学术心理学理论的一个重要属性，但此后实用性在该领域的重要性逐渐减弱。现在评估理论的主要依据是它们解释脱离背景的实验室数据的能力，而不是它们帮助解决社会问题的能力。除了临床、群体间和健康领域值得称赞的例外，大多数心理学理论与人们的日常生活几乎没有关系，政策制定者的可及性较差，甚至适用于其他更有能力将理论转化为实践领域的学者的工作. 我们将心理学理论缺乏对社会其他部分的相关性、可及性和适用性称为实用性危机。实用性危机损害了该领域吸引下一代学者并在国家层面保持活力的能力。我们描述了实践理论并说明了它在自我调节领域的应用。如果该领域的学者决定重视实用性，心理学理论在历史和科学上都处于有利地位。我们提供了一系列激励措施来鼓励社会心理学回归到 Lewinian 的关于解决紧迫社会问题的有用科学的愿景。