Hasty Theories

Why Social Psychology Needs to Stop Rushing to Explain

I just became president of a scientific society dedicated to understanding human motivation, and my first official act was to sit through a keynote delivered by one of my heroes that made me want to stand up and shout “I don’t fully agree!”

I recently returned from a trip to Washington, DC, where I attended the annual meeting of the Society for the Science of Motivation. What has stayed with me the most is a talk delivered by one of the OGs of motivation research, Arie Kruglanski, that felt like a lament for the decline of grand theorizing.

In his view, social psychology (and motivation science) needs more theory. Big theory. Grand unifying frameworks to organize our scattered findings into something coherent and meaningful. The field, he argued, has become so fixated on rigor and methodological reform that it’s become distracted from the real work of theorizing. All this preregistration and replication stuff? That’s nice, but where are the bold ideas and sweeping explanations? Kruglans…