Generalizability challenges in applied psychological and organizational research and practice

Wiernik, Brenton M.; Raghavan, Mukhunth; Allan, Tyler; Denison, Alex J

doi:10.1017/s0140525x21000492

Cited by 16 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Another feature of integrative theories is that they will lend themselves to a “use-inspired” approach. Practitioners and researchers alike generally acknowledge that no single intervention, however evidence-based, benefits all individuals in all circumstances (i.e., across populations and contexts ) and that overgeneralization from lab experiments in many areas of behavioral science can (and routinely does) lead practitioners and policymakers to deploy suboptimal and even dangerous real-world interventions (Brewin, 2022; de Leeuw, Motz, Fyfe, Carvalho, & Goldstone, 2022; Grubbs, 2022; Wiernik, Raghavan, Allan, & Denison, 2022). Therefore, social scientists should precisely identify the most effective intervention under each arising set of circumstances.…”

Section: From One-at-a-time To Integrative By Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Playing 20 Questions with Nature: Integrative Experiment Design in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

et al. 2022

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The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment's specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. The researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm—and with far greater efficiency.

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Section: From One-at-a-time To Integrative By Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Playing 20 Questions with Nature: Integrative Experiment Design in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Another feature of integrative theories is that they will lend themselves to a "use-inspired" approach. Practitioners and researchers alike generally acknowledge that no single intervention, however evidence-based, benefits all individuals in all circumstances (i.e., across populations and contexts) and that overgeneralization from lab experiments in many areas of behavioral science can (and routinely does) lead practitioners and policymakers to deploy suboptimal and even dangerous real-world interventions (Brewin, 2022;de Leeuw, Motz, Fyfe, Carvalho, & Goldstone, 2022;Grubbs, 2022;Wiernik, Raghavan, Allan, & Denison, 2022). Therefore, social scientists should precisely identify the most effective intervention under each arising set of circumstances.…”

Section: Bridging Scientific and Pragmatic Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

The elephant's other legs: What some sciences actually do

Baron

2024

Behav Brain Sci

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Integrative experiments, as described, seem blindly empirical, as if the question of generality of effects could not be understood through controlled one-at-a-time experiments. But current research using such experiments, especially applied research, can resolve issues and make progress through understanding of cause–effect pathways, leaving to engineers the task of translating this understanding into practice.

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Section: Bridging Scientific and Pragmatic Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Test many theories in many ways

Cyrus-Lai,

Tierney,

Uhlmann

2024

Behav Brain Sci

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Demonstrating the limitations of the one-at-a-time approach, crowd initiatives reveal the surprisingly powerful role of analytic and design choices in shaping scientific results. At the same time, cross-cultural variability in effects is far below the levels initially expected. This highlights the value of “medium” science, leveraging diverse stimulus sets and extensive robustness checks to achieve integrative tests of competing theories.

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Generalizability challenges in applied psychological and organizational research and practice

Cited by 16 publications

References 11 publications

Beyond Playing 20 Questions with Nature: Integrative Experiment Design in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Beyond Playing 20 Questions with Nature: Integrative Experiment Design in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

The elephant's other legs: What some sciences actually do

Test many theories in many ways

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