Less Is More: Psychologists Can Learn More by Studying Fewer People

[摘要] Psychology has been embroiled in a professional crisis as of late. The research methods commonly used by psychologists, especially the statistical analyses used to analyze experimental data, are under scrutiny. The lack of reproducible research findings in psychology and the paucity of published studies attempting to replicate psychology studies have been widely reported (e.g., Pashler and Wagenmakers, 2012; Ioannidis et al., 2014; Open Science Collaboration, 2015). Although it is encouraging that people are aware of problems evident in mainstream psychology research and taking actions to correct them (e.g., Open Science Collaboration, 2015), one problem has received little or no attention: the reliance on between-subjects research designs. The reliance on group comparisons is arguably the most fundamental problem at hand because such designs are what often necessitate the kinds of statistical analyses that have led to psychology's professional crisis (Sidman, 1960; Michael, 1974; Parsonson and Baer, 1978). But there is an alternative.

[学科分类] 心理学（综合）

[关键词] experimental design;idiographic research;research methods;single-case designs;inferential statistics