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, psychological scientists have begun to realize that they may not be ready to test hypotheses. Forcing researchers to prematurely test hypotheses before they have established a sound “derivation chain” between test and theory is counterproductive. Instead, various nonconfirmatory research activities should be used to obtain the inputs necessary to make hypothesis tests informative. Before testing hypotheses, researchers should spend more time forming concepts, developing valid measures, establishing the causal relationships between concepts and the functional form of those relationships, and identifying boundary conditions and auxiliary assumptions. Providing these inputs should be recognized and incentivized as a crucial goal in itself. In this article, we discuss how shifting the focus to nonconfirmatory research can tie together many loose ends of psychology’s reform movement and help us to develop strong, testable theories, as Paul Meehl urged.

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The many tools that social and behavioral scientists use to gather data from their fellow humans have, in most cases, been honed on a rarefied subset of humanity: highly educated participants with unique capacities, experiences, motivations, and social expectations. Through this honing process, researchers have developed protocols that extract information from these participants with great efficiency. However, as researchers reach out to broader populations, it is unclear whether these highly refined protocols are robust to cultural differences in skills, motivations, and expected modes of social interaction. In this paper, we illustrate the kinds of mismatches that can arise when using these highly refined protocols with nontypical populations by describing our experience translating an apparently simple social discounting protocol to work in rural Bangladesh. Multiple rounds of piloting and revision revealed a number of tacit assumptions about how participants should perceive, understand, and respond to key elements of the protocol. These included facility with numbers, letters, abstract number lines, and 2D geometric shapes, and the treatment of decisions as a series of isolated events. Through onthe-ground observation and a collaborative refinement process, we developed a protocol that worked both in Bangladesh and among US college students. More systematic study of the process of adapting common protocols to new contexts will provide valuable information about the range of skills, motivations, and modes of interaction that participants bring to studies as we develop a more diverse and inclusive social and behavioral science. generalizability | diversity | cross-cultural | social discounting | Bangladesh I n 1932, the psychologist Rensis Likert (1) published his dissertation on a novel method for measuring attitudes. After giving university students printed statements about race relations, Likert asked them to check one of five options (strongly approve, approve, undecided, disapprove, and strongly disapprove) indicating how much they endorsed each of these statements. Likert then assigned numbers to these levels of approval and took an average across all statements. The simplicity of both the response format and construction of the scale soon spurred researchers to adopt elements of the technique to assess not only attitudes (Likert's original interest) but also subjective judgments along many dimensions, including likelihood, desirability, difficulty, and happiness (2). Today, after decades of testing and refinement on generations of participants, Likert's simple format has become a reliable mainstay of social and behavioral research.Given its ubiquity in the social and behavioral sciences, one might guess that a five-or seven-item Likert format is a natural way of asking humans about their subjective judgments. However, in the rare cases when researchers have described their experience using Likert items outside of formally educated populations, they have been met with mixed success (3,4). It turns out tha...

of young male risk-taking may be byproducts of the greater risk-proneness that is a prerequisite 70 for the propensity to enter into potentially lethal male-male confrontations. Second, many 71 nonviolent forms of risk-taking, such as those occurring in contexts of resource acquisition, may 72Running head: CRAZY BASTARD 3 reflect the same logic as that underlying male-male violence, namely that the higher fitness 73 payoffs of success make gambling more worthwhile for men, particularly when young. Third, 74 nonviolent risk-taking can honestly signal attributes, including both underlying genetic quality 75 and manifestations such as strength and coordination, that are valued by potential mates, affines, 76 and allies. Fourth, some acts offer inductive potential beyond the specific act itself, as they 77 index the tendency to engage in a larger class of actions of which the observed act is an instance.

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 (Meehl, 1990). In response to the replication crisis, reforms in psychology have focused on formalising procedures for testing hypotheses. These reforms were necessary and impactful. However, as an unexpected consequence, psychologists have begun to realise that they may not be ready to test hypotheses. Forcing researchers to prematurely test hypotheses before they have established a sound ‘derivation chain’ between test and theory is counterproductive. Instead, various non-confirmatory research activities should be used to obtain the inputs necessary to make hypothesis tests informative. Before testing hypotheses, researchers should spend more time forming concepts, developing valid measures, establishing the causal relationships between concepts and their functional form, and identifying boundary conditions and auxiliary assumptions. Providing these inputs should be recognised and incentivised as a crucial goal in and of itself. In this article, we discuss how shifting the focus to non-confirmatory research can tie together many loose ends of psychology’s reform movement and help us lay the foundation to develop strong, testable theories, as Paul Meehl urged us to.

The debate about whether replication studies should become mainstream is essentially driven by disagreements about their costs and benefits and the best ways to allocate limited resources. Determining when replications are worthwhile requires quantifying their expected utility. We argue that a formalized framework for such evaluations can be useful for both individual decision-making and collective discussions about replication.

Current scientific reforms focus more on solutions to the problem of reliability (e.g. direct replications) than generalizability. Here, we use a cross-cultural study of social discounting to illustrate the utility of a complementary focus on generalizability across diverse human populations. Social discounting is the tendency to sacrifice more for socially close individuals—a phenomenon replicated across countries and laboratories. Yet, when adapting a typical protocol to low-literacy, resource-scarce settings in Bangladesh and Indonesia, we find no independent effect of social distance on generosity, despite still documenting this effect among US participants. Several reliability and validity checks suggest that methodological issues alone cannot explain this finding. These results illustrate why we must complement replication efforts with investment in strong checks on generalizability. By failing to do so, we risk developing theories of human nature that reliably explain behaviour among only a thin slice of humanity.

Symptoms of illness provide information about an organism's underlying state. This notion has inspired a burgeoning body of research on organisms' adaptations for detecting and changing behavior toward ill individuals. However, little attention has been paid to a likely outcome of these dynamics. Once an organism's fitness is affected by others' responses to symptoms of illness, natural selection can favor individuals who alter symptom expression to influence the behavior of others. That is, many symptoms may originate as cues, but will evolve into signals. In this paper, I develop the hypothesis that symptoms of illness serve signaling functions, and provide a comprehensive review of relevant evidence from diverse disciplines. I also develop novel empirical predictions generated by this hypothesis and discuss its implications for public health. Signaling provides an ultimate explanation for otherwise opaque aspects of symptom expression, such as why symptoms fluctuate in social contexts, and can exist without underlying pathology, and why individuals deliberately generate symptoms of illness. This analysis suggests that signaling theory is a major organizing framework for understanding symptom etiology.