The Struggle Is Real

Abstract

Strong theories are sorely lacking in the applied social sciences, especially in psychology. Elko Fried (2020) identifies fundamental problems that are common in social science research and explains how these problems manifest themselves in the literature, impede scientific progress, and contribute to the lack of theory building. We hope to share some insights from our program of research on working memory and intelligence. In our work, we address several of the problems discussed by Fried, and we proposed a solution, Process Overlap Theory (POT), a new approach to intelligence that integrates evidence from cognitive psychology, psychometrics, and neuroscience. The commentary reviews several points of our agreement with Fried, drawing on examples from our research. Then we discuss a few of our concerns and problems with graduate training. We argue that most graduate programs lack the kind of formal training that is necessary to promote theory building. The lead author (Conway) teaches graduate-level statistics and three of the coauthors (Hao, Goring, Schmank) are current graduate student so we offer some advice on how to address this problem.