Badly specified theories are not responsible for the replication crisis in social psychology: Comment on Klein

Abstract

Klein (2014) argues that the replication crisis in social psychology is due—at least in large part—to the tendency of psychological theories to be ill-specified. We disagree. First, we use both historical and contemporary examples to show that high-quality replication is possible even in the absence of a well-specified theory; and, second, we argue that it is typically auxiliary assumptions, rather than theories themselves, that need to be more clearly specified in order to understand the implications of a given replication effort.