Falsificationist and confirmationist approaches provide two well-established ways of evaluating generalizability. Yarkoni rejects both and invents a third approach we call neo-operationalism. His proposal cannot work for the hypothetical concepts psychologists use, because the universe of operationalizations is impossible to define, and hypothetical concepts cannot be reduced to their operationalizations. We conclude that he is wrong in his generalizability-crisis diagnosis.

Researchers commonly make dichotomous claims based on continuous test statistics. Many have branded the practice as a misuse of statistics and criticize scientists for the widespread application of hypothesis tests to tentatively reject a hypothesis (or not) depending on whether a p-value is below or above an alpha level. Although dichotomous claims are rarely explicitly defended, we argue they play an important epistemological and pragmatic role in science. The epistemological function of dichotomous claims consists in transforming data into quasibasic statements, which are tentatively accepted singular facts that can corroborate or falsify theoretical claims. This transformation requires a prespecified methodological decision procedure such as Neyman-Pearson hypothesis tests. From the perspective of methodological falsificationism these decision procedures are necessary, as probabilistic statements (e.g., continuous test statistics) cannot function as falsifiers of substantive hypotheses. The pragmatic function of dichotomous claims is to facilitate scrutiny and criticism among peers by generating contestable claims, a process referred to by Popper as “conjectures and refutations.” We speculate about how the surprisingly widespread use of a 5% alpha level might have facilitated this pragmatic function. Abandoning dichotomous claims, for example because researchers commonly misuse p-values, would sacrifice their crucial epistemic and pragmatic functions.

We investigate varieties of dissatisfaction by examining how the similar, yet distinct emotions of regret, disappointment, and anger are related to electoral behavior. In a 2-wave longitudinal study conducted around the UK General Election of 2017 (N 1 = 817, N 2 = 768), we measured these emotions in response to 3 levels of electoral decision-making (individual party preference, individual electoral participation, and election results) and tested the relationship between these emotions and electoral behaviors. We find that party switching in 2017 is associated with regret about the party preference in 2015 and the regret about those election results, but not with other emotions. Similarly, we also find that the regret about party preference in 2017 is associated with future party switching intentions. Disappointment with the decision to vote in the 2015 General Election is negatively associated with voting in 2017; and the same is true for the anger about participants' party choice. These results suggest that distinct dissatisfactionrelated emotions might have distinct consequences for electoral behavior.

The scientific reform movement, which is frequently referred to as open science, has the potential to substantially reshape how science is done, and for this reason, its socio-political antecedents and consequences deserve serious scholarly attention. In a recently formed literature that professes to meet this need, it has been widely argued that the movement is neoliberal. However, for two reasons it is hard to justify this wide-scale attribution: 1) the critics mistakenly attribute the movement a monolithic structure, and 2) the critics' arguments associating the movement with neoliberalism are highly questionable. In particular, critics too hastily associate the movement’s preferential focus on methodological issues and its underlying philosophy of science with neoliberalism, and their allegations regarding the pro-market proclivities of the reform movement do not hold under closer scrutiny. What is needed are more nuanced accounts of the socio-political underpinnings of scientific reform that show more respect to the complexity of the subject matter. To address this need, we propose a meta-model for the analysis of reform proposals, which represents methodology, axiology, science policy, and ideology as interconnected but relatively distinct domains, and allows for recognizing the divergent tendencies in the movement.

What is kindness, and what makes an act kind? Previous theoretical and empirical research suggests that the kindness of an act depends not only on the benefits the act provides, but also the costs incurred to provide those benefits. Here we test these predictions by having 1,692 candidate acts of kindness (for family, friends, colleagues, and strangers) rated for perceived cost, benefit, and kindness, by a large sample of the US & UK public (Ntotal=16,064). As predicted, we found that benefit, cost, and benefit:cost interaction all positively predicted the kindness of the act (pseudo R2≈0.73), and did so for all types of recipients. We also found that less efficient acts are considered kinder than more efficient acts. We discuss the implications of these findings for discussions about the effectiveness of altruism, and the prospects for further research on the nature of kindness.