Abstract
Contemporary psychology regards itself as an empirical science, at least in most of its subfields. Theory building and development are often considered critical to the sciences, but the extent to which psychology can be cast in this way is under debate. According to those advocating a strong role of theory, studies should be designed to test hypotheses derived from theories (theory-driven) and ideally should yield findings that stimulate hypothesis formation and theory building (theory-generating). The alternative position values empirical findings over theories as the lasting legacy of science. To investigate which role theory actually plays in current research practice, we analyse references to theory in the complete set of 2,046 articles accepted for publication in Frontiers of Psychology in 2015. This sample of articles, while not representative in the strictest sense, covers a broad range of sub-disciplines, both basic and applied, and a broad range of article types, including research articles, reviews, hypothesis & theory, and commentaries. For the titles, keyword lists, and abstracts in this sample, we conducted a text search for terms related to empiricism and theory, assessed the frequency and scope of usage for six theory-related terms, and analyzed their distribution over different article types and subsections of the journal. The results indicate substantially lower frequencies of theoretical than empirical terms, with references to a specific (named) theory in less than 10% of the sample and references to any of even the most frequently mentioned theories in less than 0.5% of the sample. In conclusion, we discuss possible limitations of our study and the prospect of theoretical advancement.
Highlights
Psychology shares with philosophy an interest in bold questions: Who are we? How do our minds work? Why do we behave the way we do? Where does consciousness come from and where does it reside? Or: Do we have a free will? Questions like these figure prominently in human reasoning and intellectual endeavors around the world (e.g., White and Kirkpatrick, 1987; Wierzbicka, 1989; Lillard, 1998; Scharfstein, 1998) and have fuelled scholarly discourse within European philosophy for over two millennia (Flanagan, 1991; Brysbaert and Rastle, 2013)
Summary In the previous sections, we assessed the referents of each match of six strings used in the basic text search, we identified irrelevant meanings, and we scrutinized the usage of the corresponding theory-related terms hypothesis, law, mechanism, model, simulation, and theory
While the number of matches found in the basic text search represents an upper bound of occurrences of the intended usage of the terms, as argued in section Basic Text Search, the numbers found in the qualitative analyses of selected terms are only marginally lower: References to theory, whether general or specific, were found in 19.2% of the 2,046 articles
Summary
Psychology shares with philosophy an interest in bold questions: Who are we? How do our minds work? Why do we behave the way we do? Where does consciousness come from and where does it reside? Or: Do we have a free will? Questions like these figure prominently in human reasoning and intellectual endeavors around the world (e.g., White and Kirkpatrick, 1987; Wierzbicka, 1989; Lillard, 1998; Scharfstein, 1998) and have fuelled scholarly discourse within European philosophy for over two millennia (Flanagan, 1991; Brysbaert and Rastle, 2013). Regardless of the position one takes in the debate on whether theory is the key or a barrier to scientific advance in psychology, there is a lack of empirical data on the degree to which authors nowadays do rely on theory or attempt to revise it Against this background, we aim to take a snapshot of the role played by theory in contemporary psychology, and we do so using the following proxies: (i) we take what psychologists publish in journal articles (arguably their most valued currency) as a reflection of their concern with a specific topic, in this case theoretical frameworks; (ii) we take a sample of more than 2,000 such articles—published in 2015 in a journal of psychology that is not restricted to specific topics and that claims to be “The #1 largest and the #2 most cited Psychology journal,” namely Frontiers in Psychology—as a largely representative sample of work in scientific psychology; (iii) we take the mention of theoryrelated terms in the titles, keywords, and abstracts of these articles as indicative of the relevance that they grant to theory (as compared to the mention of empirical terms); and (iv) we take a selection of six terms as comprehensive evidence of this concern.
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