Phenomena in the world we study can often be described by various mathematical structures. If a psychologist who studies human behavior takes a realist position, they should not choose a mathematical structure that represents this behavior without examination as to whether the phenomenon could be represented by this structure, but they should eventually choose the mathematical structure after thorough reasoning based on full knowledge of the problem. Using Cronbach and Gleser’s measure for assessing the similarities between psychological profiles, I show that psychologists often simply copy the mathematical structure used in other research without thoroughly reasoning about the problem. As Arocha (2021) shows, researchers should prefer approaches that include no unjustified assumptions about the mathematical structure that represents the behavior.

我们研究的世界中的现象往往可以用各种数学结构来描述。如果一个研究人类行为的心理学家采取现实主义的立场，他们不应该在没有检查这种结构是否可以表示现象的情况下选择一个代表这种行为的数学结构，而是应该在基于充分推理的彻底推理后最终选择数学结构。对问题的充分了解。使用 Cronbach 和 Gleser 的方法来评估心理特征之间的相似性，我表明心理学家通常只是简单地复制其他研究中使用的数学结构，而没有对问题进行彻底的推理。正如 Arocha (2021) 所表明的那样，研究人员应该更喜欢那些对代表行为的数学结构没有不合理假设的方法。