Correction to: Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-020-09524-5

The original version of this article unfortunately has errors and should be corrected.

The first sentence of the first paragraph at p.522 should read:

“Psychology is an atypical science, as its main object of study is not clearly defined.”

The last two sentences of the first paragraph at p.522 should read:

“This formulation might solve the issue shortly, however, it is still not shared by a sufficient proportion of the scientific community. Definitions of mind popular today are materialistic - mind interpreted exclusively as brain activity (e.g. Cacioppo and Freberg 2013) or, more often, descriptive-set - mind intended as a list of activities moving within it (see Appendix Table 1).”

The last sentence of the second paragraph at p.522 should read:

“Activities (such as thinking and reasoning) and concepts (such as cognition and emotions) included defining the mind are themselves circularly defined by the formulation of the mind itself, resulting in vacuous recursion (Appendix Tables 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6).”

The third footnote (p.523) should read:

“The objective study of subjective experience presents by definition epistemological difficulties since it compares objective properties measured by the scientific inquiry with apparently irreducible entities such as inner and private mental states - sometimes referred to as qualia.”

The first sentence of the fourth footnote (p.524) should read:

“Someone could argue for the inclusion of influential sources, both due to their historical importance (e.g. William James, Wilhelm Wundt, John Watson...) or due to their specialization in specific psychological sub-disciplines (e.g. Noam Chomsky, Burrhus Skinner in language studies, Jaak Panksepp and Antonio Damasio in emotion studies).”

The third sentence of the seventh footnote (p.525 ) should read:

“Intelligence is a wide concept, often assumed to underlie most cognitive processes, or, more specifically, to be a sort of general “cognitive ability” (Bernstein et al. 2012, p.373), a varying potential of cognitive processing.

In the method section, the third sentence in the first paragraph (p.525) should read:

“Cognitive functions” often are the main objects of study in scientific psychology.”

In the results section, the second sentence in the “consciousness” paragraph (p.527) should read:

“Definitions largely vary, but ten out of the twelve sources tautologically define consciousness as “awareness”, one vaguely defines it as “the brain process that creates our mental representation” and finally one source does not define it.”

In the results section, the third sentence in the “thinking” paragraph (p. 528) should read:

A lot of concepts are listed along with them, such as “cognitive processes”, “information”, “inferences”, “conclusions”, “ideas”, “images” and “scripts”.

In the discussion section, the fifth sentence in the first paragraph (p.528 ) should read:

“We think that a consensus could be reached by embracing a theoretical framework (Royce 1987).”

In the discussion section, the second sentence in the second paragraph (p.528) should read:

“Evolutionary psychology, in line with evolutionary biology, tries to answer Tinbergen’s (1963) “four questions”: 1) mechanism: “What is the structure of the trait; how does it work?” 2) ontogeny: “How does the trait develop in individuals?”) (Nesse 2013, p.681) 3) phylogeny: “What is the system’s history? How has it changed through evolution, and how does it differ between related species?” and 4) adaptation: “Why did the system evolve into its present form? What evolutionary advantages did it provide?” (Del Giudice 2018, p.42).”

In the discussion section, the first sentence in the third paragraph (p.529) should read:

“Ultimate and proximate explanations are complementary; together, they can offer a satisfactory explanation of the functioning of psychological mechanisms.”

In the “First Critical Aspect: Is it any Different in the So-Called “harder” Sciences?” section, the second sentence in the first paragraph (p.529) should read:

“It is widely accepted that the scientific inquiry is constantly reviewing and redefining its constructs (Kuhn 1970), so a similar situation could be evidenced in other branches of knowledge.”

In the “First Critical Aspect: Is it any Different in the So-Called “harder” Sciences?” section, the first sentence in the fourth paragraph (p.530) should read:

“Psychology is both historically (Simonton 2004) and contemporarily (Fanelli 2010; Fanelli and Glänzel 2013) considered “soft” when compared to “hard” sciences such as physics, biology, or chemistry.”

In the “First Critical Aspect: Is it any Different in the So-Called “harder” Sciences?” section, the third sentence in the fourth paragraph (p.530) should read:

“To assess if this difference in “hardness” is real, we conducted a comparison between psychological science and these three sciences (physics, biology, and chemistry).”

In the “A Synchronic Point of View” sub-section, the first sentence in the first paragraph (p. 530) should read:

The first question seems to have been answered by empirical literature, which, by using some sophisticated bibliometric and statistical methodologies, has empirically demonstrated what only used to be conceptual speculation (Simonton 2002, 2004; Fanelli 2010; Fanelli and Glänzel 2013).

In the “A Synchronic Point of View” sub-section, in the “theories-to-laws” bullet-point (p.530) the first two sentences should read:

A measure from Roeckelein (1997), called the “theories-to-laws ratio” (the number of cited theories divided by the number of cited laws in textbooks). “The ratio will be well-balanced, i.e., show low values, for the “natural” sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) and be poorly balanced, i.e., show high values, for the “social” sciences (anthropology, sociology)” (Roeckelein 1997, p. 131).”

The second sentence in the second paragraph at p. 532 should read:

“In other words, “researchers in “softer” sciences should have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases, and therefore report more positive outcomes” (Fanelli 2010, p.1).”

In the “A Diachronic Point of View” sub-section, in the second paragraph, the first sentence (p. 533–534) should read:

Consistent with the considerations about the experimental method applied to conceptual disputes, we based our commentary only on existing empirical literature on “historical trends” in psychology (Robins et al. 1999; Tracy et al. 2005; Spear 2007).

In the “A Diachronic Point of View” sub-section, in the second paragraph, the second sentence (p. 534) should read

“These studies assessed the prominence of every theory thanks to particular bibliometric measures; assuming the more an approach is cited the more it is prominent, they estimate the “citation pattern” of every theory and compare one to the other to determine what “rises”, what “is in decline” and so on.”

In the “A Diachronic Point of View” sub-section, in the third paragraph, the second sentence (p. 534) should read

“Spear (2007) also considered the neuro-cognitive approach.”

The first sentence in footnote 11 (p. 534) should read:

“Moreover, our focus has been exclusively on these studies because we wanted to avoid the systematic positive distortion of a researcher’s point of view towards his/her theory (Tracy et al. 2005).”

In the second paragraph at p.538, the sixth sentence should read:

“It is lust, and not a cumbersome psychological mechanism such as the “urge to donate to seed bank” that human beings want to experience.”

Footnote 17 at p. 538 should read:

“Dawkins himself noted (2016, p.13) that “The immortal gene” would have been probably a better title than “The selfish gene.”

Footnote 20 at p. 538 should read:

“The word “aim” is used in a deliberately metaphorical fashion, we do not imply teleology for genes.”

The last sentence before the “Conclusions” section (p.539) should read:

“In other words, evolutionary psychology seems to be the most complete and multifaceted approach to comprehending human (and non-human) psychological functioning.”

Footnote 22 (p.539) should read:

“Of course mating, parenting, and kinship are social processes themselves, but they are more common in the animal kingdom than the specific Homo sapiens’ social competence, which seems to have been triggered by group living”

The last sentence in the first paragraph at p.540 should read:

“Finally, the claim of unification under the name of evolutionary psychology could be seen as ideological.”

The third sentence in the second paragraph at p.540 should read:

“This does by any means intend to devalue the theoretical reasoning per se, rather, we wanted to root theory on an empirical ground.”

The last sentence in the second paragraph at p.540 should read:

“Finally, the motives we have brought into the discussion to “elect” evolutionary psychology as the most compelling metatheory are reasonable, not totaling or orthodox.”

The third sentence in the fourth paragraph at p.540 should read:

“This would not mean an indiscriminate gathering of all the theories, but rather a coherent yet comprehensive application of the evolutionary principles in psychology.”