The ideal experiment in physics must be conceptual, cunning, and conclusive. Adoption of these same standards in psychology has led to experiments that are uninformative and frivolous. We explain why we believe that psychology is fundamentally incompatible with hypothesis-driven theoretical science and conclude that this erodes the logic behind recent proposals to improve psychological research, such as stricter statistical standards, preregistration, and replication. The failure of psychology is not that it is somehow insufficiently scientific but rather that it makes inordinate use of methods that are a mismatch for the aspirations of researchers in the field, at the expense of valuable empirical research.

物理学中理想的实验必须是概念性的、狡猾的和结论性的。在心理学中采用这些相同的标准导致了没有信息和无聊的实验。我们解释了为什么我们认为心理学从根本上与假设驱动的理论科学不相容，并得出结论认为这削弱了最近改进心理学研究的建议背后的逻辑，例如更严格的统计标准、预注册和复制。心理学的失败不在于它在某种程度上不够科学，而是它过度使用了与该领域研究人员的愿望不匹配的方法，而牺牲了有价值的实证研究。