My thesis in a nutshell: "There is no convincing reason to assume that explicitly formalized mathematical rules and the clinician's creativity are eq… - Paul E. Meehl

Owing to the abusive reliance upon significance testing—rather than point or interval estimation, curve shape, or ordination—in the social sciences, the usual article summarizing the state of the evidence on a theory (such as appears in the Psychological Bulletin) is nearly useless.

Sir Ronald has befuddled us, mesmerized us, and led us down the primrose path. I believe that the almost universal reliance on merely refuting the null hypothesis as the standard method for corroborating substantive theories in the soft areas is a terrible mistake, is basically unsound, poor scientific strategy, and one of the worst things that ever happened in the history of psychology.

a fairly widespread tendency to report experimental findings with a liberal use of ad hoc explanations for those that didn't "pan out." ... especially tempting in the "soft" fields of (personality and social) psychology, where the profession highly rewards a kind of "cuteness" or "cleverness" in experimental design, such as a hitherto untried method for inducing a desired emotional state, or a particularly "subtle" gimmick for detecting its influence upon behavioral output.