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Discussion identifies strategies and conventions allowing surrogates to persist and spread.
I first discuss several strategies that serve as surrogates for theories in psychology: one-word explanation, redescription, drawing vague dichotomies, and data fitting. I then identify two conventions that allow these surrogates to flourish and multiply: null hypothesis testing, which makes precise hypotheses irrelevant, and the isolation of research in different disciplines, which prevents the exchange of positive metaphors between fields.
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Gerd Gigerenzer (1998) studied this question.
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