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Standard methodological and statistical texts divide research methodology into two strictly separated categories: confirmatory and exploratory research. In some fields, like scientific psychology, almost all research reports are written up as if they are confirmatory, i.e., involve rigorous tests of...

As Lewin (1943) already noted, “there is nothing as practical as a good theory”. However, how do we determine which theories are good and which are bad? It is hard to improve theory quality without a tool to assess it in practice. In psychology, most subfields are characterized by weak theories ...

When, in 2015, the replication crisis was identified in the field of psychology, many researchers took up the task of working on methodology and suggesting practices that would help improve the replicability of findings in psychology. More recently, it has been noted that many of the identified prob...

Current approaches to resolving psychology’s theoretical problems converge in their call for the further formalization of psychological theory (e.g., Fried, 2020; Van Rooij & Baggio, 2021; Borsboom et al., 2021; Robinaugh et al., 2021; Guest & Martin, 2021). In contrast, we have argued that psycho...

In current practice, psychological explanations typically present a narrative in which a theory renders a putative empirical phenomenon intuitively likely. However, whether the theory actually implies the phenomenon in question is also left to this intuition. To design a test for such a theory, diff...