Features of Science in Psychology: Falsifiability and Paradigms

When 100 published psychology studies were repeated, 97% of the originals had reported significant results but only 36% of the repeats did. The features of science in psychology exist to catch exactly that kind of gap.

Is psychology a science? A-level students are asked some version of that question in almost every exam series. Answering it well depends on knowing what “science” actually means. The AQA specification sets it out as four pairs of ideas: objectivity and the empirical method, replicability and falsifiability, theory construction and hypothesis testing, and paradigms and paradigm shifts (AQA, 2021).

These eight features are more than a list to memorise. They are the checks that separate a claim you can trust from one that only sounds convincing. They explain why researchers write precise, testable hypotheses, why studies are scrutinised through peer review before publication, and why a famous finding can collapse when someone tries to repeat it.

This guide takes each pair in turn, with a real study for every feature. It then compares the two philosophers the topic is built on, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, and applies the features to each approach in psychology. It ends with a practice quiz and a plan for the 8-mark question.

What Are the Features of Science in Psychology?

The features of science in psychology are the eight characteristics that make an investigation scientific: objectivity, the empirical method, replicability, falsifiability, theory construction, hypothesis testing, paradigms and paradigm shifts. AQA groups them into four pairs, and each pair answers a different question about how knowledge is produced.

The first pair is about how evidence is gathered. The second is about how claims are checked, the third about how knowledge is built up, and the fourth about how a whole science changes over time. Thinking of them as four questions rather than eight definitions makes them far easier to remember and to apply in an exam.

Two of the eight, falsifiability and paradigms, come from named philosophers of science. Falsifiability is Karl Popper’s idea and paradigms are Thomas Kuhn’s. Examiners reward students who can name them and explain how their views differ, so both get their own sections below.

Objectivity and the Empirical Method

Objectivity and the empirical method are the pair that describe how scientific evidence is gathered. Evidence should come from careful observation of the world (empirical), and it should be recorded in a way that the observer’s own hopes and beliefs cannot bend (objective).

What Is Objectivity in Psychology?

Objectivity in psychology means that findings reflect what actually happened, not what the researcher expected or wanted to happen. An objective measurement would come out the same whoever took it. A subjective one depends on the person doing the measuring.

The classic warning comes from a horse. In Germany in the early 1900s, a horse called Clever Hans appeared to answer arithmetic questions by tapping his hoof. The psychologist Oskar Pfungst tested him systematically. When the questioner knew the answer, Hans tapped correctly in 98% of 42 tests. When nobody present knew the answer, he was right in only 8% of 49 tests (Pfungst, 1911). Hans was not counting. He was reading tiny, unconscious movements of the questioner’s head and body, which told him when to stop tapping. The questioners were not cheating. They had no idea they were giving cues.

Clever Hans shows why objectivity cannot be left to good intentions. Expectations leak into results even when researchers are honest. Rosenthal and Fode (1963) made the same point with laboratory rats. Students were told their rats had been bred to be either “maze-bright” or “maze-dull”, when in fact the rats had been allocated at random. The rats labelled bright performed better. The students’ expectations had found their way into the data, even though nobody set out to bias the results.

How Do Psychologists Keep Research Objective?

Psychologists keep research objective by removing as many opportunities as possible for personal judgement to affect the data. The main techniques are:

• Standardised procedures. Every participant gets the same instructions, materials and timings, so differences in results cannot come from differences in treatment.
• Operationalised variables. Vague ideas such as “aggression” are turned into things that can be counted, such as the number of hits on a doll in a set time.
• Single-blind and double-blind designs. Participants, and ideally researchers too, do not know which condition a person is in, which blocks the kind of expectancy effect that fooled Hans’s questioners.
• Behaviour categories and inter-observer checks. In observational research, two or more trained observers code the same behaviour using agreed categories, and their records are correlated to check they agree.
• Controlled conditions. Laboratory settings reduce the influence of extraneous variables, so an effect can be traced to the variable being manipulated.

What Is the Empirical Method?

The empirical method means gaining knowledge through direct observation and measurement rather than through reasoning, intuition or authority alone. A claim is accepted only when it has been checked against evidence that others could observe too.

Psychology’s history shows why this mattered. Wilhelm Wundt, often called the father of experimental psychology, opened his laboratory at Leipzig in 1879 and studied the mind through trained introspection, asking people to report their own conscious experience (see our guide to famous psychologists). Introspection was systematic, but only the person experiencing a thought can observe it, so nobody else can check the report.

John B. Watson rejected that approach. His 1913 paper opens by declaring that psychology, as the behaviourist sees it, is “a purely objective experimental branch of natural science” (Watson, 1913). He argued that psychology should study only behaviour that anyone could observe and measure. That demand for public, measurable evidence is the empirical method in its strictest form.

Modern psychology is empirical in a broader sense. Researchers still measure behaviour, but they also use reaction times, brain scans, hormone levels and carefully designed questionnaires and interviews to get at mental processes indirectly. What matters is that the evidence is collected systematically and can be inspected by others.

Why Are Objectivity and the Empirical Method a Pair?

Objectivity and the empirical method are paired because each needs the other. Observation without objectivity just records the observer’s bias, as Clever Hans showed. Objectivity without observation has nothing to be objective about. Together they describe the starting point of science: evidence gathered from the world in a way that does not depend on who gathered it.

Replicability and Falsifiability

Replicability and falsifiability are the pair that describe how scientific claims are checked. A finding should be repeatable by other researchers, and a theory should make claims that evidence could, in principle, prove wrong.

What Is Replicability in Psychology?

Replicability in psychology means that a study can be repeated, using the same method, and produce the same results. A single study can be a fluke, a product of chance, bias or an unusual sample. A result that appears again and again, in different labs with different participants, is far more likely to be real.

Replicability depends on the original researchers reporting their method in enough detail for someone else to copy it exactly, which is one reason standardised procedures matter so much. It is closely linked to reliability: a replicated finding is, in effect, a reliable one.

What Was the Replication Crisis?

The replication crisis was the discovery, during the 2010s, that many published findings in psychology could not be reproduced. It is the strongest modern example of why replicability is listed as a feature of science.

The largest test was run by the Open Science Collaboration (2015), which repeated 100 experimental and correlational studies from three psychology journals. Ninety-seven per cent of the original studies had statistically significant results. Only 36% of the replications did, and the replication effects were on average half the size of the originals (Open Science Collaboration, 2015).

Other projects found a similar pattern. Camerer et al. (2018) repeated 21 social science experiments published in the journals Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015, using samples about five times larger than the originals. Thirteen of the 21 (62%) found a significant effect in the same direction, and the effects were on average about half the original size.

A single case shows how replication works in practice. Bem (2011) reported nine experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that seemed to show people could sense future events. The paper appeared in a leading journal. Ritchie, Wiseman and French (2012) then made three independent attempts to repeat one of the experiments exactly, and registered their plans in advance. All three failed to find any effect (Ritchie et al., 2012). Replication, not the original publication, settled the matter.

The replication crisis does not mean psychology is broken. It means the features of science did their job, eventually. A science that can discover its own errors by repeating its studies is working as intended. The problem was that repetition had not been happening often enough.

What Is Falsifiability?

Falsifiability is the idea that a scientific theory must be open to being proved false by evidence. If there is no possible observation that could show a claim to be wrong, then the claim is not scientific, however plausible it sounds. The idea comes from the philosopher Karl Popper.

Popper started from a problem with induction, which means reasoning from particular observations to a general rule. His famous example: no matter how many white swans we have observed, that does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white (Popper, 1959). Ten thousand white swans cannot prove the rule, but a single black swan can disprove it. Evidence can never prove a general theory true, but it can prove one false.

From this Popper drew a clear test for what counts as science. He summed it up by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability (Popper, 1963). Scientists should not go looking for confirmations, because confirmations are easy to find. They should make risky predictions and then try hard to prove them wrong.

Why Did Popper Say Freud’s Theory Was Unfalsifiable?

Popper said Freud’s theory was unfalsifiable because it could explain any behaviour at all, including opposite behaviours, after the event. A theory that can explain everything forbids nothing, and a theory that forbids nothing cannot be tested.

Popper illustrated this with two men. One pushes a child into water intending to drown it. The other gives his life trying to save the child. In Freudian terms, the first man is repressing part of his Oedipus complex and the second has achieved sublimation. Both are explained with equal ease (Popper, 1963). Popper had worked with Alfred Adler, another psychoanalyst, and noticed that Adler’s theory could explain both men just as easily. Popper’s conclusion was blunt: “Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory… but a vice” (Popper, 1963).

He contrasted this with Einstein’s theory of gravity. Einstein predicted that light from distant stars would be bent by the Sun’s gravity, so stars near the Sun would appear slightly shifted during an eclipse. If the 1919 eclipse photographs had shown no shift, the theory would have been refuted. It took a real risk, and it survived. That, for Popper, was what made it scientific. The psychoanalytic ideas explored in our complete guide to Sigmund Freud took no such risk.

Popper also saw why unfalsifiable theories feel so convincing. Their followers see confirming evidence everywhere, because every case can be read as support. That is confirmation bias built into the theory itself.

Falsifiable and Unfalsifiable Claims Compared

A falsifiable claim names an outcome that would show it to be wrong. An unfalsifiable claim has an answer ready for every outcome. The quickest check is to ask: “What result would make me give this up?” If the honest answer is “none”, the claim is not scientific.

How Does the Null Hypothesis Put Falsification Into Practice?

The null hypothesis puts falsification into practice by making researchers test a claim against the possibility that there is no effect at all. Psychologists do not set out to prove their experimental hypothesis. They try to reject the null hypothesis, which states that any difference or relationship is down to chance.

If the results are unlikely enough under the null hypothesis, usually at the p ≤ 0.05 level, the null is rejected and the experimental hypothesis is supported, never proved. This is why careful writers say a hypothesis is “supported” rather than “proven” in their conclusions. Our guide to statistical significance and p-values covers the decision rule in detail.

Theory Construction and Hypothesis Testing

Theory construction and hypothesis testing are the pair that describe how scientific knowledge is built up. Researchers gather findings and combine them into a general explanation, which is theory construction. They then derive precise predictions from that explanation and test them, which is hypothesis testing. The results feed back into the theory, and the cycle repeats.

What Is Theory Construction?

Theory construction is the process of building a general explanation that accounts for a set of observations. A theory is more than a summary of results. It explains why the results occurred and predicts what should happen in situations that have not yet been studied.

Theory construction usually works by induction: moving from many particular findings to a general principle. A psychologist who notices that people forget more when similar material is learned close together might propose a general theory of interference. The theory is only as good as its ability to predict new findings, which is where hypothesis testing comes in.

What Is Hypothesis Testing?

Hypothesis testing is the process of deriving a specific, testable prediction from a theory and checking it against new data. It works by deduction: moving from a general principle to a particular case. If the theory is correct, then this particular result should occur.

The combination of the two is often called the hypothetico-deductive method. It runs as a cycle:

1. Observe a pattern in the world, or notice a gap in what is known.
2. Construct a theory that could explain it.
3. Deduce a precise, testable hypothesis from the theory.
4. Design a study to test the hypothesis, usually an experiment with an operationalised independent and dependent variable.
5. Collect and analyse the data.
6. If the hypothesis is supported, the theory is strengthened. If it is not, the theory is modified or abandoned.
7. Derive new hypotheses from the revised theory and repeat.

Step 6 is where Popper’s falsification lives. A theory that keeps surviving genuine attempts to refute it becomes better supported, but it is never finally proved. A theory that fails needs changing. The laboratory experiment is the favoured tool for step 4 because it gives the tightest control over variables, which makes it easier to say that the independent variable caused any change.

Why Does Preregistration Matter for Hypothesis Testing?

Preregistration matters because it proves that a hypothesis was stated before the data were seen, not invented afterwards to fit them. Nosek et al. (2018) distinguish between prediction, where a hypothesis is tested with new observations, and postdiction, where an explanation is generated from observations already made. Mixing the two up makes findings look far stronger than they are, and ordinary hindsight bias makes the mistake hard to avoid.

Preregistration fixes this by recording the hypothesis and the analysis plan in advance. A stronger version, the Registered Report, was launched at the journal Cortex (Chambers, 2013). Peer review happens before the results are known, and the journal agrees to publish the study whatever it finds.

The difference this makes is striking. Scheel et al. (2021) compared 71 Registered Reports with 152 standard hypothesis-testing papers in psychology. In the standard papers, 96% of first hypotheses were supported. In the Registered Reports, only 44% were. When researchers cannot choose what to report after seeing the data, far fewer hypotheses come out supported. That is hypothesis testing as it is supposed to work.

Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts

Paradigms and paradigm shifts are the pair that describe how a science changes over time. The ideas come from the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, whose book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was first published in 1962.

What Is a Paradigm?

A paradigm is the shared set of assumptions, methods and accepted examples that the members of a scientific community work within. Kuhn described paradigms as scientific achievements that provide “model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners” (Kuhn, 1962/1970, p. viii). A paradigm tells scientists what questions are worth asking, what methods are legitimate and what a good answer looks like.

Kuhn’s examples came from physics and chemistry, such as the work of Newton and Lavoisier. In psychology, the closest example is behaviourism. For several decades in the 20th century, many American psychologists shared its assumptions. Only observable behaviour should be studied. Learning happens through conditioning. Findings from animals can be applied to humans. The work of B. F. Skinner and operant conditioning shows what research inside that paradigm looked like.

Kuhn himself admitted the word was slippery. In a postscript to the second edition he noted that one sympathetic reader had counted at least 22 different ways he used it (Kuhn, 1962/1970). For A-level purposes, a paradigm is the shared framework that a whole discipline accepts.

How Does a Paradigm Shift Happen?

A paradigm shift happens when problems the current paradigm cannot solve pile up until the community abandons it for a new one. Kuhn described science as moving through a series of stages rather than growing steadily:

Kuhn’s picture of normal science is far less heroic than Popper’s. Most scientists, he argued, spend almost all their time on what he called “mop-up work”, solving puzzles within the paradigm rather than trying to overturn it. He also argued that switching paradigms is less like following a proof and more like a change of vision. Kuhn compared it to a gestalt switch: what were ducks in the scientist’s world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards (Kuhn, 1962/1970).

Is Psychology Pre-Paradigmatic?

Psychology may be pre-paradigmatic, meaning it has not yet settled on one shared paradigm, and Kuhn himself raised the possibility. In the preface to his book he explains that he developed the idea of paradigms after a year at a centre for the behavioural sciences. He was struck by how much social scientists disagreed about which problems and methods were legitimate. Controversies over fundamentals, he wrote, seemed “endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists” (Kuhn, 1962/1970, p. viii).

The evidence for this view is easy to see. Psychology today contains the biological, behaviourist, cognitive, psychodynamic, humanistic and social learning approaches. Each makes different assumptions about what causes behaviour and how it should be studied. In a mature Kuhnian science such as physics, researchers argue about details but share the same basic framework. Psychology’s approaches often disagree about the framework itself.

Has Psychology Had a Paradigm Shift?

Psychology may have had a paradigm shift, and the most commonly cited example is the cognitive revolution. From the 1950s onwards, psychologists turned from behaviourism back to the study of mental processes, often using the computer as a model of the mind. George Miller, one of the psychologists involved, later wrote that psychology could not take part in the cognitive revolution until it had freed itself from behaviourism (Miller, 2003).

Not everyone accepts that this was a Kuhnian revolution. Leahey (1992) examined how the behaviourist and cognitive “revolutions” were seen at the time and argued that neither fits Kuhn’s model. Each was a period of rapid but continuous change, not a sudden replacement of one paradigm by another. Behaviourist research on learning did not stop. Cognitive psychology grew alongside it and absorbed much of its experimental method.

This debate is itself good exam material. If psychology has had genuine paradigm shifts, that suggests it behaves like a mature science. If it has only had shifts in fashion, with several approaches running side by side, that supports the view that it is still pre-paradigmatic.

Popper vs Kuhn: How Do Their Views of Science Compare?

Popper and Kuhn disagree about how science actually works. Popper describes how science should work: bold theories exposed to constant attempts at refutation. Kuhn describes how science has worked in history: long periods of normal science inside a paradigm, interrupted by occasional revolutions.

The two views are not completely opposed, and strong answers use both. Popper explains why a single study must make falsifiable predictions. Kuhn explains why a whole discipline can go on using a theory despite anomalies, and why psychology’s many competing approaches matter when deciding whether it is a science.

Is Psychology a Science? Applying the Features to Each Approach

Psychology is partly a science. Some of its approaches meet the features of science well, while others meet them only partly or hardly at all. The honest answer to “is psychology a science?” depends on which part of psychology you are looking at.

The humanistic approach is a special case. Carl Rogers and others argued that experimental methods miss what is most important about people, their subjective experience and free will. For humanistic psychologists, failing to meet the features of science is not a weakness to fix but a choice. A similar point applies to the in-depth case study method used by Freud, which trades replicability for rich detail about one person.

Arguments That Psychology Is a Science

• Much of modern psychology uses controlled experiments, standardised procedures and statistical testing, the same tools used in the natural sciences.
• Many theories make precise, falsifiable predictions, and some have been rejected or revised when those predictions failed.
• The replication crisis shows science’s self-correcting system working. Psychologists found the problem by applying scientific standards to their own field, then introduced preregistration and Registered Reports to fix it.
• Psychology draws increasingly on neuroscience and genetics, which are firmly scientific.

Arguments That Psychology Is Not Fully a Science

• Kuhn’s point still stands: psychology has several competing approaches rather than one shared paradigm.
• Human participants react to being studied. Demand characteristics and investigator effects threaten objectivity in ways that do not affect rocks or chemicals.
• Highly controlled experiments can lack ecological validity, so gaining objectivity can cost realism.
• Some influential theories, especially psychodynamic ones, remain largely unfalsifiable.
• Researchers bring cultural assumptions to their work. Gender and cultural bias can shape which questions are asked and how results are read, even when the method looks objective.

Practice Quiz: Spot the Feature of Science

The quickest way to check whether you really understand the features of science is to apply them to unfamiliar research. Each scenario below illustrates one feature most clearly. Pick your answer to see the explanation.

How to Answer Features of Science Exam Questions

Features of science questions on AQA A-level Paper 2 range from short definitions to extended “discuss” questions. The same method works for all of them: define the feature precisely, give a psychology example, then apply or evaluate.

Short-Answer Questions

Short-answer questions usually ask you to explain one feature or to identify one in a stimulus. Examiners look for a precise definition in your own words and a clear link to psychology. For “Explain what is meant by falsifiability”, a strong answer defines it as the possibility of a claim being proved false by evidence. It then adds a psychology example, such as a hypothesis that could be rejected by the results of an experiment.

When a question includes a research scenario, use it. Quote or refer to specific details from the stem. A generic definition that could apply to any study rarely earns full marks on an application question.

Planning an 8-Mark “Discuss” Answer

An extended question such as “Discuss whether psychology can be considered a science” needs both description and evaluation. A reliable plan:

1. Open with a clear position. Say that psychology meets some features of science more than others, depending on the approach.
2. Describe two or three features accurately. Choose the ones you can use best, for example falsifiability, replicability and paradigms. Name Popper and Kuhn.
3. Apply each feature to a specific approach or study. Behaviourist conditioning research as highly controlled and replicable, psychodynamic theory as hard to falsify.
4. Use evidence. The Open Science Collaboration (2015) replication rate is a strong, precise piece of evidence for a replicability point.
5. Evaluate from both sides. Balance the self-correcting response to the replication crisis against the problems of human participants and competing paradigms.
6. Conclude. Give a justified judgement, such as psychology being a science in method but a pre-paradigmatic one according to Kuhn.

The most common mistake is listing all eight features with a line of definition each. That shows memory but not understanding. Two or three features, explained and applied in depth, will score higher than eight skimmed ones.

Conclusion

The features of science give psychology a toolkit for deciding which claims deserve trust. Objectivity and the empirical method govern how evidence is gathered. Replicability and falsifiability govern how claims are checked. Theory construction and hypothesis testing describe how knowledge is built, and paradigms and paradigm shifts describe how a whole discipline changes.

Popper and Kuhn offer two different lenses. Popper asks whether a theory can be proved wrong. Kuhn asks whether a field shares one framework at all. Applied to psychology, the answer is mixed. Behaviourist, biological and much cognitive research meet the features well. Psychodynamic and humanistic psychology meet them poorly, the humanistic approach by choice. The replication crisis exposed real weaknesses, but the response to it, with larger samples, preregistration and Registered Reports, is the features of science in action.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the features of science in psychology?

The features of science in psychology are objectivity, the empirical method, replicability, falsifiability, theory construction, hypothesis testing, paradigms and paradigm shifts. The AQA A-level specification presents them as four pairs. Together they describe how scientific evidence is gathered, checked, built into theories and eventually replaced, and they are used to judge how scientific each approach in psychology is.

What is falsifiability in psychology?

Falsifiability in psychology is the requirement that a theory or hypothesis could, in principle, be shown to be wrong by evidence. Karl Popper proposed it as the dividing line between science and non-science. A hypothesis such as “caffeine improves reaction time” is falsifiable, because slower or unchanged reaction times after caffeine would count against it.

What is an example of a paradigm shift in psychology?

The best-known example of a paradigm shift in psychology is the cognitive revolution, when many researchers moved from behaviourism, which studied only observable behaviour, to cognitive psychology, which studies internal mental processes such as memory and attention. Some historians, such as Leahey (1992), argue this change was too gradual to count as a true Kuhnian revolution.

Is psychology a science?

Psychology is a science in much of its method but not in every part of the discipline. Behaviourist, biological and cognitive research use controlled experiments, measurement and testable predictions. Psychodynamic theories are hard to falsify, and humanistic psychology deliberately rejects the scientific model. Kuhn also suggested that psychology lacks a single shared paradigm, which would make it pre-paradigmatic.

What is the empirical method in psychology?

The empirical method in psychology is the practice of basing knowledge on direct observation and measurement rather than on belief, intuition or authority. For example, a psychologist testing whether revision with practice tests works would compare students’ actual exam scores, not ask them whether they feel the technique helped.

What does objectivity mean in psychology?

Objectivity in psychology means collecting and interpreting data without letting personal opinions, expectations or feelings influence the results. An objective measure would give the same result whoever recorded it. Researchers increase objectivity by using standardised instructions, clearly defined behaviour categories and blind procedures in which observers do not know the hypothesis.

What is replicability in psychology?

Replicability in psychology is the ability of a study to be repeated, using the same procedure, with the same results. It matters because a finding that appears only once may be due to chance or error. High replicability requires a clearly reported, standardised method, and a finding that replicates across different labs and samples is treated as far more trustworthy.

What is theory construction in psychology?

Theory construction in psychology is the process of developing a general explanation that accounts for a set of research findings and predicts new ones. It usually starts with observations and works towards a general principle, which is inductive reasoning. The theory is then tested through hypotheses derived from it and revised when the evidence does not fit.

How do you answer a features of science 8 marker?

To answer a features of science 8-mark question:

1. Choose two or three features rather than listing all eight.
2. Define each one precisely and name Popper or Kuhn where relevant.
3. Apply each feature to a specific approach or study in psychology.
4. Evaluate, with points on both sides.
5. Finish with a justified conclusion that answers the question set.

References

AQA. (2021). AS and A-level psychology specification (7181, 7182) (Version 1.2). AQA.

Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 407–425.

Camerer, C. F., Dreber, A., Holzmeister, F., Ho, T.-H., Huber, J., Johannesson, M., Kirchler, M., Nave, G., Nosek, B. A., Pfeiffer, T., Altmejd, A., Buttrick, N., Chan, T., Chen, Y., Forsell, E., Gampa, A., Heikensten, E., Hummer, L., Imai, T., . . . Wu, H. (2018). Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(9), 637–644.

Chambers, C. D. (2013). Registered Reports: A new publishing initiative at Cortex. Cortex, 49(3), 609–610.

Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1962)

Leahey, T. H. (1992). The mythical revolutions of American psychology. American Psychologist, 47(2), 308–318.

Miller, G. A. (2003). The cognitive revolution: A historical perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 141–144.

Nosek, B. A., Ebersole, C. R., DeHaven, A. C., & Mellor, D. T. (2018). The preregistration revolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(11), 2600–2606.

Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), Article aac4716.

Pfungst, O. (1911). Clever Hans (the horse of Mr. von Osten) (C. L. Rahn, Trans.). Henry Holt and Company.

Popper, K. R. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery. Hutchinson.

Popper, K. R. (1963). Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge. Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Ritchie, S. J., Wiseman, R., & French, C. C. (2012). Failing the future: Three unsuccessful attempts to replicate Bem’s ‘retroactive facilitation of recall’ effect. PLoS ONE, 7(3), Article e33423.

Rosenthal, R., & Fode, K. L. (1963). The effect of experimenter bias on the performance of the albino rat. Behavioral Science, 8(3), 183–189.

Scheel, A. M., Schijen, M. R. M. J., & Lakens, D. (2021). An excess of positive results: Comparing the standard psychology literature with Registered Reports. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 4(2).

Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20(2), 158–177.

Further Reading and Research

Recommended Articles

• Peer Review in Psychology: Process, Types and Evaluation
• Aims and Hypotheses in Psychology: Directional and Non-Directional
• Reliability in Psychology: Types, Assessment and Improvement

Suggested Books

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
  • The original source of paradigms, normal science and scientific revolutions. The preface explains how watching social scientists argue led Kuhn to the idea.
• What Is This Thing Called Science? by Alan Chalmers
  • A readable introduction to the philosophy of science, covering induction, Popper’s falsificationism and Kuhn’s paradigms in plain language.
• Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie
  • An account of the replication crisis and research misconduct by one of the psychologists who failed to replicate Bem’s precognition study, with practical fixes.

Recommended Websites

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Karl Popper
  • A detailed, authoritative entry on Popper’s life, the problem of induction and falsifiability, including the main criticisms.
• AQA A-level Psychology specification (7182)
  • The exact wording of the features of science and the rest of the research methods content you can be examined on.
• Center for Open Science: Registered Reports
  • Explains how Registered Reports work and lists the journals that accept them, a practical look at hypothesis testing reform.

Kathy Brodie

Kathy Brodie is an Early Years Professional, Trainer and Author of multiple books on Early Years Education and Child Development. She is the founder of Early Years TV and the Early Years Summit.

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Early Years TV Features of Science in Psychology: Falsifiability and Paradigms. Available at: https://www.earlyyears.tv/features-of-science-psychology-falsifiability-paradigms/ (Accessed: 11 October 2026).