Beyond the hype: A simulation study evaluating the predictive performance of machine learning models in psychology.

² = .80), which are arguably rarely met in psychological research. Second, each ML model outperformed the others under certain conditions, but none was consistently superior or entirely robust to suboptimal data characteristics. We stress that data quality fundamentally limits predictive performance and discuss the interpretation of comparisons between flexible ML models and simpler (regularized linear) baselines in psychological research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).