Responding to a recent call for the development of a psychology of science, we examine how scientists manage empirical anomalies, a routine yet consequential challenge in scientific practice, and how their responses shape theory development. We argue that defensive anomaly-reduction strategies, which allow researchers to preserve an initial theoretical claim, can generate important secondary benefits. During the emergence phase of a theory, they foster auxiliary revisions that may reduce underfitting and place a fragile theory on a growth trajectory. During the exploitation phase of established theories, they help sustain attention to problems derived from the theory and support cumulative research. However, their accumulation may also increase the risk of overfitting, reduce predictive power, and set the theory on a degenerative trajectory. We illustrate these dynamics primarily through examples drawn from psychological theories, with a focus on responses to replication failures. Last, we derive several implications for peer review aimed at fostering scientific innovation. In particular, we propose shifting evaluation away from the consistency of findings, which may penalize emerging research programs and hinder innovation, and toward how inconsistencies are managed, thereby fostering growth trajectories, including for mature programs confronted with anomalies.
A historical analysis of systems theory ideas from the biological and physical sciences reveals their infusion into sociology and action-oriented subfields of psychology, including social, organizational, developmental, and community psychology. Constructs and processes are identified that are useful for creating a framework to understand, assess, and transform social settings. The central theoretical concept that surfaces is the emergent pattern of dynamic transactions that communicates critical information and meaning, referred to as “social regularity.” This is followed by an examination of the varying definitions and frameworks of proximal social settings (e.g., classrooms, community-based organizations, workplaces) in which individuals derive the bulk of their experiences in forming their character, identity, learning, and well-being. Social regularity is at the core of an evolving social-setting model that communicates meaning through several channels—control and power, modes of expressing communication, and the flow of information—that result in corresponding distributional equity outcomes. From these communication channels, an action model for transforming social settings to create more equitable aggregate-level individual outcomes and improved setting outcomes is explicated. Corresponding methods of measurement are described. Various strategies and tactics are suggested to directly target social regularities. Relational-, norm-, and structural-focused examples are provided.
Scholarly excellence is often equated with deep specialization within a single domain, a premise embedded in doctoral training, peer review, and academic-evaluation systems. However, research from the emerging “science of science,” drawing on large-scale analyses of publications, citations, and career trajectories, suggests a more complex relationship between expertise, cross-domain engagement, and scholarly impact. This conceptual article synthesizes insights from the science of science, cognitive research on expertise, and organizational studies to examine the roles of domain-specific depth and different forms of cross-domain engagement in the development of scholarly excellence. We argue that depth and breadth are complementary capacities whose contributions vary across career stages and institutional contexts. We distinguish between multidisciplinary exposure, interdisciplinary integration, and, in rarer cases, transdisciplinary contributions that extend beyond existing boundaries. Domain-specific expertise supports technical mastery, credibility, and efficient knowledge accumulation, whereas integrative forms of cross-domain engagement facilitate recombination, problem reframing, and long-term intellectual influence. We further show how academic-reward structures favor depth while discounting integrative contributions. We conclude by outlining implications for doctoral education, faculty evaluation, and research policy, and by proposing a developmental framework that supports diverse trajectories of scholarly excellence.
This article connects deception research, specifically truth-default theory (TDT), to misinformation scholarship. Through TDT’s propositions and supporting empirics, we demonstrate how central questions in misinformation scholarship can benefit from deeper engagement with deception research and in particular TDT. Findings in the misinformation literature that have been surprising or unexpected (e.g., relatively few people are exposed to and share misinformation online) are predicted and explained by TDT. Robust conclusions from TDT about deception in human communication (e.g., people are truth-biased) are challenged by findings from misinformation research, prompting deeper investigation. Deception-detection research paradigms provide conceptual and empirical reference points relevant to the design of misinformation-detection tasks and interpretation of their results (e.g., true–false base rates, prompted vs. unprompted veracity judgments). Analytic approaches from TDT (e.g., analyzing accuracy for truthful and deceptive messages independently) support existing misinformation research aiming to understand the detection of misinformation and can holistically evaluate the outcomes of misinformation interventions, and TDT’s findings on how to improve deception-detection accuracy also suggest strategies for interventions that improve the detection of misinformation without undermining trust in credible news and information.
Psychological science, including research on child cognition, behavior, and development, has traditionally relied on convenience samples drawn from a narrow range of sociocultural communities. Moving beyond the simplifying WEIRD/non-WEIRD dichotomy, this study estimates the global representativeness of children participating in developmental research across multiple metrics of human cultural experience. A systematic review of studies published between 2016 and 2020 in five leading journals reveals a disproportionate focus on children from communities situated at the extremes of all selected metrics. This bias is coupled with a selective disregard for cultural context in research originating from these overrepresented settings, reflecting a persistent double standard in how culture is treated across the field. Notably, studies involving children from underrepresented communities do not receive greater recognition (e.g., citations) unless they are embedded within larger, multinational research projects. We discuss the implications for representativeness, contextualization, and epistemic inclusion of these patterns, and we advocate for systemic change toward a genuinely global science of child development and psychological science more broadly.
