Argument Development: Deriving & Confronting Predictions (psychrev-argument-development)

When to trigger

• The model is built but you have not shown what it predicts
• You assert the theory "explains" phenomena without deriving them
• You have not compared your predictions to rival models on diagnostic cases
• A reviewer will ask "could this theory have been wrong?"

What replaces a results section here

Psychological Review has no experiment of its own as the contribution. The work that an empirical paper does with data, a Review paper does with derivation and confrontation: you derive predictions from the model's assumptions, then confront them with already- existing evidence and with what rival models predict. Logical and quantitative soundness is the rigor standard, exactly as statistical inference is at empirical journals.

The derivation discipline