Original article: Vianello, M., & Bar-Anan, Y. (2020). Can the implicit association test measure automatic judgment? The validation continues. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(2), 415–421. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619897960

On the basis of converging research, we concluded that the controversial topic of unconscious blockage of psychological trauma (i.e., repressed memory) remains very much alive in clinical, legal, and academic contexts. In his commentary, Brewin (this issue, p. 443) conducted a cocitation analysis and concluded that scholars do not adhere to the concept of unconscious repression. Furthermore, he argued

In a prior publication, I used structural equation modeling of multimethod data to examine the construct validity of Implicit Association Tests. The results showed no evidence that IATs measure implicit constructs (e.g., implicit self-esteem, implicit racial bias). This critique of IATs elicited several responses by implicit social-cognition researchers, who tried to defend the validity and usefulness

The fusion of personal and group identities can lead to self-sacrificial progroup behavior, from acts of charity to violent extremism. Two pathways to identity fusion—via shared biology and shared experiences—have been proposed. In this article, we elucidate a new developmental account of the origins and mechanisms of these two pathways to identity fusion from childhood to adulthood. Whereas fusion

Despite a long-standing expert consensus about the importance of cognitive ability for life outcomes, contrary views continue to proliferate in scholarly and popular literature. This divergence of beliefs presents an obstacle for evidence-based policymaking and decision-making in a variety of settings. One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond

Psychologists are navigating an unprecedented period of introspection about the credibility and utility of their discipline. Reform initiatives emphasize the benefits of transparency and reproducibility-related research practices; however, adoption across the psychology literature is unknown. Estimating the prevalence of such practices will help to gauge the collective impact of reform initiatives

The scientific enterprise has long been based on the presumption of replication, although scientists have recently become aware of various corruptions of the enterprise that have hurt replicability. In this article, we begin by considering three illustrations of research paradigms that have all been subject to intense scrutiny through replications and theoretical concerns. The three paradigms are one

Psychological science is increasingly influencing public policy. Behavioral public policy (BPP) was a milestone in this regard because it influenced many areas of policy in a general way. Well-being public policy (WPP) is emerging as a second domain of psychological science with general applicability. However, advocacy for WPP is criticized on ethical and political grounds. These criticisms are reminiscent

Psychologists are spending a considerable amount of time researching and developing interventions in hopes that their efforts can help to tackle some of society’s pressing problems. Unfortunately, those hopes are often not realized—many interventions are developed and reported in journals but do not make their way into the broader world they were designed to change. One potential reason for this is

In their analysis in a previous issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, Roberts and colleagues argued that the editors, authors, and participants throughout subfields of psychological science are overwhelmingly White. In this commentary, we consider some of the drivers and consequences of this racial inequality. Drawing on race scholarship from within and outside the field, we highlight three

Science is often perceived to be a self-correcting enterprise. In principle, the assessment of scientific claims is supposed to proceed in a cumulative fashion, with the reigning theories of the day progressively approximating truth more accurately over time. In practice, however, cumulative self-correction tends to proceed less efficiently than one might naively suppose. Far from evaluating new evidence

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals are less healthy than heterosexual individuals, and minority stress endured by LGB individuals contributes to these health disparities. However, within-groups differences in minority stress experiences among LGB individuals remain underexplored. Individuals are more likely to be categorized as LGB if they exhibit gender nonconformity, so gender nonconformity

Genome-wide association (GWA) studies have shown that genetic influences on individual differences in affect, behavior, and cognition are driven by thousands of DNA variants, each with very small effect sizes. Here, we propose taking inspiration from GWA studies for understanding and modeling the influence of the environment on complex phenotypes. We argue that the availability of DNA microarrays in

A typology of unpublished studies is presented to describe various types of unpublished studies and the reasons for their nonpublication. Reasons for nonpublication are classified by whether they stem from an awareness of the study results (result-dependent reasons) or not (result-independent reasons) and whether the reasons affect the publication decisions of individual researchers or reviewers/editors

Moral reasoning is an essential part of how humans develop and a fundamental aspect of how human societies change over time. On a developmental timescale, reasoning about interpersonal disagreements and dilemmas spurs age-related changes in moral judgments from childhood to adulthood. When asked to distribute resources among others, even young children strive to balance competing concerns with equality

Popular dual-process models of thinking have long conceived intuition and deliberation as two qualitatively different processes. Single-process-model proponents claim that the difference is a matter of degree and not of kind. Psychologists have been debating the dual-process/single-process question for at least 30 years. In the present article, I argue that it is time to leave the debate behind. I

Hispanics have a lower burden of heart disease than would be predicted from their risk factors. Explanations for this phenomenon, the Hispanic paradox, focus on specific characteristics of the culture that affect stress appraisal and accumulation, including social connections. Features of culture evolve in the context of language, which influences the way emotions are appraised and expressed. The Spanish

The field of psychology has a long history of encouraging researchers to disseminate their findings to the broader public. This trend has continued in recent decades in part because of professional psychology organizations reissuing calls to “give psychology away.” This recent wave of calls to give psychology away is different because it has been occurring alongside another movement in the field—the

People’s self-concept contributes to their sense of identity over time. Yet self-perception is motivated and serves survival and thus does not reflect stable inner states or accurate biographical accounts. Research indicates that different types of comparison standards act as reference frames in evaluating attributes that constitute the self. However, the role of comparisons in self-perception has

Steps involved in the creative process have been described in previous research, yet the exact nature of the process still remains unclear. In the current study, we take this investigation further, referring to two flying machines developed by Leonardo da Vinci and his other notes. Nine iterative steps are described with a focus on motivation and cognition: (a) vision and curiosity; (b) social recognition;

By sharing their world, humans and other animals sustain each other. Their world gets determined over time as generations of animals act in it. Current approaches to psychological science, by contrast, start from the assumption that the world is already determined before an animal’s activity. These approaches seem more concerned with uncertainty about the world than with the practical indeterminacies

Critics have suggested that psychological research is characterized by a pervasive liberal bias, and this problem may be particularly acute in research on issues related to public policy. In this article, I consider the sources of bias in basic and applied research in the evaluation, conduct, and communication of research. Techniques are suggested for counteracting bias at each of these stages.

We present norms for faculty citation counts based on 811 faculty members at 30 PhD-granting psychology departments in the United States across the range of the National Research Council rankings. The metrics were highly skewed, with most scientists having a low to moderate number of citations of their work and a few scientists having extremely high numbers. However, the median per-year citation count

Student outcomes are influenced by different types of motivation that stem from external incentives, ego involvement, personal value, and intrinsic interest. The types of motivation described in self-determination theory each co-occur to different degrees and should lead to different consequences. The associations with outcomes are due in part to unique characteristics and in part to the degree of

Egon Brunswik coined the term ecological validity to refer to the correlation between perceptual cues and the states and traits of a stimulus. Martin Orne adapted the term to refer to the generalization of experimental findings to the real world outside the laboratory. Both are legitimate uses of the term because the ecological validity of the cues in an experiment determines the ecological validity

Executive function plays a foundational role in everyday behaviors across the life span. The theoretical understanding of executive-function development, however, is still a work in progress. Doebel proposed that executive-function development reflects skills using control in the service of behavior—using mental content such as knowledge and beliefs to guide behavior in a context-specific fashion.

Science progresses by finding and correcting problems in theories. Good theories are those that help facilitate this process by being hard to vary: They explain what they are supposed to explain, they are consistent with other good theories, and they are not easily adaptable to explain anything. Here we argue that, rather than a lack of distinction between exploratory and confirmatory research, an

In response to questions regarding the scientific basis for mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs), we evaluated their empirical status by systematically reviewing meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). We searched six databases for effect sizes based on four or more trials that did not combine passive and active controls. Heterogeneity, moderators, tests of publication bias, risk of

This article aims to improve theory formation in psychology by developing a practical methodology for constructing explanatory theories: theory construction methodology (TCM). TCM is a sequence of five steps. First, the theorist identifies a domain of empirical phenomena that becomes the target of explanation. Second, the theorist constructs a prototheory, a set of theoretical principles that putatively

In recent years, a growing chorus of researchers has argued that psychological theory is in a state of crisis: Theories are rarely developed in a way that indicates an accumulation of knowledge. Paul Meehl raised this very concern more than 40 years ago. Yet in the ensuing decades, little has improved. We aim to chart a better path forward for psychological theory by revisiting Meehl’s criticisms,

It is commonplace, when discussing the subject of psychological theory, to write articles from the assumption that psychology differs from the physical sciences in that we have no theories that would support cumulative, incremental science. In this brief article I discuss one counterexample: Shepard’s law of generalization and the various Bayesian extensions that it inspired over the past 3 decades

Researchers run experiments to test theories, search for and document phenomena, develop theories, or advise policymakers. When testing theories, experiments must be internally valid but do not have to be externally valid. However, when experiments are used to search for and document phenomena, develop theories, or advise policymakers, external validity matters. Conflating these goals and failing to

Chronic positive mood (CPM) has been shown to confer a wide variety of social, functional, and health benefits. Some researchers have argued that humans evolved to feel CPM, which explains why most people report better than neutral mood (the “positivity offset bias”) and why particularly happy people have particularly good outcomes. Here, we argue that the Duchenne smile evolved as an honest signal

In psychiatry, mental dysfunction is typically framed in relation to models that seek to be continuous with physiology or evolutionary biology and that compare individual fitness to a broader functional norm. Proponents of the neurodiversity movement, however, challenge the pathologization of minority cognitive styles and argue that we should reframe neurocognitive diversity as a normal and healthy

Neonatal imitation is a cornerstone in many theoretical accounts of human development and social behavior, yet its existence has been debated for the past 40 years. To examine possible explanations for the inconsistent findings in this body of research, we conducted a multilevel meta-analysis synthesizing 336 effect sizes from 33 independent samples of human newborns, reported in 26 articles. The meta-analysis

Original article: Ko, A., Pick, C. M., Kwon, J. Y., Barlev, M., Krems, J. Arona, Varnum, M. E. W., Neel, R., Peysha, M., Boonyasiriwat, W., Brandstätter, E., Crispim, A. Carla, Cruz, J. Eduardo, David, D., David, O. A., de Felipe, R. P., Fetvadjiev, V. H., Fischer, R., Galdi, S., Galindo, O., . . . Kenrick, D. T. (2020). Family matters: Rethinking the psychology of human social motivation. Perspectives

When two people look at the same object in the environment and are aware of each other’s attentional state, they find themselves in a shared-attention episode. This can occur through intentional or incidental signaling and, in either case, causes an exchange of information between the two parties about the environment and each other’s mental states. In this article, we give an overview of what is known

Deficit-based accounts of social and communication abilities continue to dominate autism research. However, emerging findings suggest that this view may be overly simplistic and discount the two-way nature of interaction. Here we discuss the reconceptualization of social cognition to consider such difficulties as examples of bidirectional, multifaceted misattunement between autistic and nonautistic

Because of the strong overreliance on p values in the scientific literature, some researchers have argued that we need to move beyond p values and embrace practical alternatives. When proposing alternatives to p values statisticians often commit the “statistician’s fallacy,” whereby they declare which statistic researchers really “want to know.” Instead of telling researchers what they want to know

Classroom settings bring to light many differences between children—differences that children notice and attempt to explain. Here, we advance theory on the psychological processes underlying how children explain the differences they observe in the classroom. Integrating evidence from cognitive, social, cultural, developmental, and educational psychology, we propose that young children tend to explain

Multidimensional motivational theories postulate that the type of motivation is as important as the quantity of motivation, with implications for human functioning and well-being. An extensive amount of research has explored how constructs contained within these theories relate to the activation of the endocrine system. However, research is fragmented across several theories, and determining the current

Meehl argued in 1978 that theories in psychology come and go, with little cumulative progress. We believe that this assessment still holds, as also evidenced by increasingly common claims that psychology is facing a “theory crisis” and that psychologists should invest more in theory building. In this article, we argue that the root cause of the theory crisis is that developing good psychological theories

Paul Meehl’s famous critique detailed many of the problematic practices and conceptual confusions that stand in the way of meaningful theoretical progress in psychological science. By integrating many of Meehl’s points, we argue that one of the reasons for the slow progress in psychology is the failure to acknowledge the problem of coordination. This problem arises whenever we attempt to measure quantities

In the face of unreplicable results, statistical anomalies, and outright fraud, introspection and changes in the psychological sciences have taken root. Vibrant reform and metascience movements have emerged. These are exciting developments and may point toward practical improvements in the future. Yet there is nothing so practical as good theory. This article outlines aspects of reform and metascience

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine candidates are being evaluated, with the goal of conferring immunity on the highest percentage of people who receive the vaccine as possible. It is noteworthy that vaccine efficacy depends not only on the vaccine but also on characteristics of the vaccinated. Over the past 30 years, a series of studies has documented the impact of

One particular weakness of psychology that was left implicit by Meehl is the fact that psychological theories tend to be verbal theories, permitting at best ordinal predictions. Such predictions do not enable the high-risk tests that would strengthen our belief in the verisimilitude of theories but instead lead to the practice of null-hypothesis significance testing, a practice Meehl believed to be

Psychology endeavors to develop theories of human capacities and behaviors on the basis of a variety of methodologies and dependent measures. We argue that one of the most divisive factors in psychological science is whether researchers choose to use computational modeling of theories (over and above data) during the scientific-inference process. Modeling is undervalued yet holds promise for advancing

At least since Meehl’s (in)famous 1978 article, the state of theorizing in psychology has often been lamented. Replication studies have been presented as a way of directly supporting theory development by enabling researchers to more confidently and precisely test and update theoretical claims. In this article I use contemporary work from philosophy of science to make explicit and emphasize just how

The current debate about how to improve the quality of psychological science revolves, almost exclusively, around the subordinate level of statistical significance testing. In contrast, research design and strict theorizing, which are superordinate to statistics in the methods hierarchy, are sorely neglected. The present article is devoted to the key role assigned to manipulation checks (MCs) for scientific

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

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

Drawing on the philosophy of psychological explanation, we suggest that psychological science, by focusing on effects, may lose sight of its primary explananda: psychological capacities. We revisit Marr’s levels-of-analysis framework, which has been remarkably productive and useful for cognitive psychological explanation. We discuss ways in which Marr’s framework may be extended to other areas of psychology

Heterogeneity emerges when multiple close or conceptual replications on the same subject produce results that vary more than expected from the sampling error. Here we argue that unexplained heterogeneity reflects a lack of coherence between the concepts applied and data observed and therefore a lack of understanding of the subject matter. Typical levels of heterogeneity thus offer a useful but neglected

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

Long-standing structural features of the military have created a culture and society that is dramatically different and disconnected from civilian society. Thus, veterans transitioning to civilian society face a number of challenges related to fulfilling basic psychological needs (e.g., need for structure and order, belonging) and civilians’ reliance on stereotypes to understand military veterans.

I aver that standard economics as a model of human behavior is as incorrect in 2017 (after Thaler) as geocentrism was as a model of celestial behavior in 1617 (after Galileo). Behavioral economic studies that have exposed the paradoxes and anomalies in standard economics are akin to epicycles on geocentrism. Just as no amount of epicycles could salvage geocentrism as a model of celestial behavior because

In the battle for control of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), we have few weapons. Yet contact tracing is among the most powerful. Contact tracing is the process by which public-health officials identify people, or contacts, who have been exposed to a person infected with a pathogen or another hazard. For all its power, though, contact tracing yields a variable level of success. One reason is that

Discrimination is a pressing, global problem (Smith, 2011, 2016). Like the commentators on my original article (Giner-Sorolla et al., 2021; Goldenberg et al., 2021; Smith, 2021; Vaes et al., 2021), I believe that understanding the psychological causes underlying discrimination will bring us one small step closer to reducing its prevalence and impact. A particularly influential idea within the social

Statistical-learning (SL) theory offers an experience-based account of typical and atypical spoken and written language acquisition. Recent work has provided initial support for this view, tying individual differences in SL abilities to linguistic skills, including language impairments. In the current article, we provide a critical review of studies testing SL abilities in participants with and without

All too often, people who develop exceptionally astute insights into others remain mysterious to these others. Evidence for such asymmetric understanding comes from several independent domains. Striking asymmetries occur among those who differ in status and power, such that individuals with low status and power understand more than they are understood. We show that this effect extends to people who