Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology
📄 Original study ↗Plain English Summary
Published in 1978, this remarkably prescient paper essentially predicted the replication crisis that wouldn't fully erupt for another three decades. Meehl's target: the way 'soft' psychology (think personality, social, and clinical research) leans almost entirely on null hypothesis significance testing -- that familiar ritual of checking whether your result earns a little asterisk in a table. His devastating point is that the null hypothesis (the claim that there's zero effect) is almost always literally false, so rejecting it tells you very little about whether your actual theory is any good. It's like celebrating that you found a needle in a haystack when the haystack is made of needles. He proposed an alternative using his taxometric method, which nailed 94% accuracy with zero false negatives across 600 simulations -- genuinely impressive. This critique lands squarely on psi research debates too, where both believers and skeptics tally up p-values and trade 'significant' results like baseball cards, often missing the deeper question of what those numbers actually mean.
Abstract
Theories in "soft" areas of psychology lack the cumulative character of scientific knowledge. They tend neither to be refuted nor corroborated, but instead merely fade away as people lose interest. Even though intrinsic subject matter difficulties (20 listed) contribute to this, the excessive reliance on significance testing is partly responsible, being a poor way of doing science. Karl Popper's approach, with modifications, would be prophylactic. Since the null hypothesis is quasi-always false, tables summarizing research in terms of patterns of "significant differences" are little more than complex, causally uninterpretable outcomes of statistical power functions. Multiple paths to estimating numerical point values ("consistency tests") are better, even if approximate with rough tolerances; and lacking this, ranges, orderings, second-order differences, curve peaks and valleys, and function forms should be used. Such methods are usual in developed sciences that seldom report statistical significance. Consistency tests of a conjectural taxometric model yielded 94% success with zero false negatives.
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📋 Cite this paper
Meehl, Paul E (1978). Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.46.4.806
@article{meehl_1978_theoretical_risks,
title = {Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology},
author = {Meehl, Paul E},
year = {1978},
journal = {Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology},
doi = {10.1037/0022-006X.46.4.806},
}