Category: “Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology”

Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1978, Vol. 46, 806-34.

The soft corroboration of psychology

Isn’t the social scientist’s use of the null hypothesis simply the application of Popperian (or Bayesian) thinking in con­texts in which probability plays such a big role? No, it is not. One reason it is not is that the usual use of null hypothesis testing in soft psychology as a means of “corroborating” substantive theories does not subject the theory to grave risk of refutation modus tollens, but only to a rather feeble danger. The kinds of theories and the kinds of theoretical risks to which we put them in soft psychology when we use significance testing as our method are not like testing Meehl’s theory of weather by seeing how well it forecasts the number of inches it will rain on certain days. Instead, they are depressingly close to testing the theory by seeing whether it rains in April at all, or rains several days in April, or rains in April more than in May. [821-2]