Why most psychological research findings are not even wrong

Abstract

Psychology's replication crisis is typically conceptualized as the insight that the published literature contains a worrying amount of unreplicable, false-positive findings. At the same time, meta-scientific attempts to assess the crisis in more detail have reported substantial difficulties in identifying unambiguous definitions of the scientific claims in published articles and determining how they are connected to the presented evidence. I argue that most claims in the literature are so critically underspecified that attempts to empirically evaluate them are doomed to failure—they are not even wrong. Meta-scientists should beware of the flawed assumption that the psychological literature is a collection of well-defined claims. To move beyond the crisis, psychologists must reconsider and rebuild the conceptual basis of their hypotheses before trying to test them.