a fairly widespread tendency to report experimental findings with a liberal use of ad hoc explanations for those that didn't "pan out." ... especiall… - Paul E. Meehl

a theory that has seven facts for it and three facts against it is not in good shape, and it would not be considered so in any developed science.

In the developed sciences, theories tend either to become widely accepted and built into the larger edifice of well-tested human knowledge or else they suffer destruction in the face of recalcitrant facts and are abandoned, perhaps regretfully as a “nice try.” But in fields like personology and social psychology, this seems not to happen. There is a period of enthusiasm about a new theory, a period of attempted application to several fact domains, a period of disillusionment as the negative data come in, a growing bafflement about inconsistent and unreplicable empirical results, multiple resort to ad hoc excuses, and then finally people just sort of lose interest in the thing and pursue other endeavors.

As is well-known (and not disputed by Popper), when we spell out in detail the logical structure of what purports to be an observational test of a theoretical conjecture T, we normally find that we cannot get to an observational statement from T alone. We require further a set of often complex and problematic auxiliaries A, plus the empirical realization of certain conditions describing the experimental particulars C [but] in social science the auxiliaries A and the initial and boundary conditions of the system C are frequently as problematic as the theory T itself.