ABSTRACT
‘The color blue is an appetite suppressant’ (Spence 2018), ‘playing with blocks helps children develop their spatial ability’ (Schmitt et al. 2025), and ‘throughout the life course, people's mean social dominance, conscientiousness, and emotional stability increase, especially in young adulthood’ (Roberts et al. 2006). While these conclusions from psychology studies may seem convincing, judging whether they are sound depends for an important part on how the concepts in these studies – i.e., ‘appetite,’ ‘spatial ability,’ ‘social dominance’ – were measured.
