Do Researchers Claim Their Findings Are Applicable to the Real World? An Empirical Study of Social and Personality Psychology Articles

The topics and questions that social and personality psychologists study attract a great deal of public interest. The level of evidence required to make an application claim should be high, in our opinion, to avoid misapplying evidence that could be harmful or ineffective, which could erode the public’s trust in the field. Our field’s challenges with reproducibility, common threats to construct, internal, external, and statistical conclusion validity, and the dearth of independent replications in the field, suggest that application claims should be rare. To investigate how often social and personality psychologists make application claims in their published articles, we extracted and categorized application claims from 669 original empirical social and personality psychology articles published from 2010 to 2020 across sevens. Just over one quarter of articles contained at least one application claim, and 1 in 20 articles contained an application claim in the Abstract. We did not find a significant association between having an application claim, and articles’ i) citation count or ii) Altmetric score, however, we did not have sufficient evidence to conclude that there is no association. The extent to which published application claims are warranted, and are actually applied, are open question for future research.