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Theory, data, interpretations, and more theory.

Article Excerpt
Even though the paper had been revised and resubmitted for a second round of reviews at JCA, at some level I felt like the authors were perversely begging the editorial referees to recommend rejection of the manuscript. The revision involved an extensive rewriting of some sections, citations were added, the data were subjected to additional new analysis, and the authors provided very detailed supplemental notes to explain the changes to the reviewers. Yet for the directive from the decision on the first version that they provide a stronger conceptual context for study, the authors only noted they considered it unnecessary.

To my amazement, they refused to provide a theoretical basis for the research. The omission was explained with the simple assertion that "We are behaviorists" and therefore not concerned with theory, as if that would excuse data collection for its own sake.

At the most basic level, they misunderstood that psychologists "invented" behaviorism itself as a basis for theoretical explanations, prediction and testing. If you will forgive a minor lapse into the pedantic, the original term referenced a direction for research in a social science that would allow control and measurement of all relevant variables by ignoring human...

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