That's a very interesting perspective, thank you. If you don't mind me asking, do you have a sense of why this feels necessary in psych - is it deference to some preferred school of thought that needs to sign off on your work, or is it more that you need to signal that you know lots of theory? How did you go about it, when they made you put in a theory chapter?
What would happen if you turned in some psych work that was robust in its method, but without explicit references to theory?
> What would happen if you turned in some psych work that was robust in its method, but without explicit references to theory?
It would get rejected. I actually replicated a really interesting negative finding (around optimism and health) multiple times with a good design, and couldn't get it published as I didn't have an explanation for why this happened (i do now, but have been in the private sector for well over a decade at this point).
> it deference to some preferred school of thought that needs to sign off on your work, or is it more that you need to signal that you know lots of theory?
That sounds tough to work in. Do people ever cross-pollinate between theoretical positions and use eachothers data without the competing theory attached, or are they completely siloed off?
I dunno really, it honestly seemed like the theory was the point, which is so ass backwards that I just couldn't handle it.
Note that this all happened before the replication crisis, but I 100% wasn't surprised, having been shocked and appalled by the statistical methods used in "top" papers.
As Andrew Gelman notes, peer review doesn't help if all of your peers are wrong about the same things.
What would happen if you turned in some psych work that was robust in its method, but without explicit references to theory?