Irvine Elizabeth
School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2021 Jul;16(4):844-853. doi: 10.1177/1745691620970558. Epub 2021 Jan 13.
At least since Meehl's (in)famous 1978 article, the state of theorizing in psychology has often been lamented. Replication studies have been presented as a way of directly supporting theory development by enabling researchers to more confidently and precisely test and update theoretical claims. In this article I use contemporary work from philosophy of science to make explicit and emphasize just how much theory development is required before "good" replication studies can be carried out and show just how little theoretical payoff even good conceptual replications offer. I suggest that in many areas of psychology aiming at replication is misplaced and that instead replication attempts are better seen as exploratory studies that can be used in the cumulative development of theory and measurement procedures.
至少自米尔（Meehl）1978年那篇著名文章发表以来，心理学的理论构建状况常常遭到诟病。复制研究被视为一种直接支持理论发展的方式，它能让研究人员更自信、精确地检验和更新理论主张。在本文中，我运用当代科学哲学的研究成果，明确并强调在开展“高质量”复制研究之前需要进行多少理论发展工作，同时揭示即使是高质量的概念复制所带来的理论回报也微乎其微。我认为，在心理学的许多领域，追求复制是错误的方向，相反，复制尝试更应被视为探索性研究，可用于理论和测量程序的累积式发展。
