Severity and Crises in Science: Are We Getting It Right When We're Right and Wrong When We're Wrong?

Abstract

Just as teachers give students exams to assess their mastery of a subject, researchers submit their theories to empirical tests. And just as a high score on a test by itself is not sufficient to believe in the student’s mastery of a subject, researchers need severe tests to make reliable inferences from observations to theories. In this paper, we provide an explication of the concept of severity, and how it underlies three current methodological crises in psychology: the theory crisis, the measurement crisis, and the generalizability crisis. Our detailed account reinforces the importance of designing tests that can prove yourself wrong, and should assist empirical researchers in evaluating the severity of their own tests.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.