Personal Reflections on Theory and Psychology

Psychology’s most important task is to integrate the various extant patchworks of theories into overarching theories. Theory integration is a longstanding concern in biology, economics, or physics, but not in psychology. We teach our students how to test theories, not the art of theory construction in the first place. As a consequence, in some parts of psychology, theories have become replaced by surrogates, such as circular restatements of the phenomenon, one-word explanations, and lists of general dichotomies. Moving backwards from existing models to labels is an odd event in science, which typically progresses in the opposite direction. Theory construction should be taught in graduate school, and editors of major journals should encourage submissions that make advances in theory integration.