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Why does our understanding of social psychological phenomena—such as why we have a moral sense, why we love some people yet hate others, and why we cooperate with others even when it’s not obviously in our self-interest—pale in comparison to the precision with which we understand cellular division, plate tectonics, and semiconductors? It’s not for a lack of effort, since thousands of social psychologists are furiously working to better understand these topics. It’s probably not for lack of talent, since professional researchers must pass through several filters on their way from bachelor’s degree to PhD to faculty position. Instead, progress is handicapped by a cold, hard fact: As far as sciences go, social psychology is as soft as a marshmallow. Our areas of inquiry are often grouped into folk categories (eg, prejudice, morality, self-control) that may imperfectly carve nature at its joints. The phenomena we study are nebulous enough that we feel compelled to posit the existence of hypothetical, unobservable constructs that must be indirectly observed via idiosyncratic measures, which are readily compromised by unreliability or by fallacious interpretations of the constructs we’re actually measuring (eg, jingle and jangle fallacies; Uher, 2011). As such, the lack of set criteria for measurement and methodology introduces “researcher” degrees of freedom, which can lead the field down a bumpy detour of false positive findings. Progress is further impeded by the fact that researchers working in different social psychological subfields use different theoretical frameworks, many of which are so disconnected from each other that discoveries made in one …