Avoiding “False Alarms” and “Misses” in Psychological Theory Building: Complementing the Principle of Parsimony With the Principle of Tentative Affirmation

Abstract

Scientific parsimony is a reliable safeguard against speculative or ideological theorizing. But it can also hamper the advent of novel ideas and advanced paradigms if misapplied within the context of a conservative thinking style. We illustrate how the principle of parsimony is ideally suited to reduce a particular type of errors—namely the premature acceptance of speculative theories. In a signal-detection framework, such errors are called “false alarms”; but signal detection theory also points to another category of errors—namely “misses,” that is, the failure to acknowledge a positively existing but elusive phenomenon. The methodological repertoire of our falsification-oriented science does not provide a similarly rigorous tool to avoid this caliber of errors. In this paper, we hence argue for introducing a complementary principle—that of tentative affirmation—to also reduce the risk of “misses.” We illustrate this latter principle using the example of conceptual, nonbiological facets of psychological phenomena. We propose a roadmap that consults both principles—parsimony and tentative affirmation—in tandem to help researchers shield their theories against one-sidedness.