In her profile of Nobel Prize winners, Zuckerman (1977) gave several attributes of the typical prize winner, but one common attribute is particularly noteworthy: They see simplicity where other people see complexity. Is this trend toward complexity one that we should follow? In my address I gave several examples of complex multilevel theories (e.g., Vallerand, 2001 the hierarchical model of motivation derived from self-determination theory) of this trend toward complexity, in addition to the work of Elliot and colleagues (e.g., 1999) and Harwood and colleagues (e.g., 2008), which I criticized earlier.
He argues that he is against the “boxes” mentality prevalent in sport psychology, where what is hoped for is a graphic model of boxes connected by arrows, as though sport psychologists knew what the boxes and arrows meant. McFee, a philosopher of science, is harshly critical of scholars in sport psychology because of their penchant for explaining phenomena with “boxes and arrows” and making things more complex than they should be (McFee, 2005). Some of this results from the natural desire to make constructs more applicable to the sport context, such as the efforts of Harwood and colleagues, but scholars often do not realize that by making things more “relevant” to sport they also make the constructs more complex and cause a subsequent loss of parsimony. In my Coleman Griffith talk, I argued that there is a trend in sport psychology to make constructs more complex than they need to be. One of Einstein's famous quotes is that in science we should make everything as simple as possible, but not too simple! Parsimony in science simply means that we keep constructs as simple as possible.
I believe that there is value in maintaining the attributes of parsimony, elegance, and conceptual coherence.
Louis, Missouri, which had the title, Whatever Happened to Parsimony, Elegance, and Conceptual Coherence in Sport Psychology? I decided to argue that forsaking some fundamental attributes of science was not in the best interests of scholars and practitioners in sport psychology. In 2008 I was asked to give the Coleman Griffith Lecture at the annual meeting of AASP in St. Parsimony, Elegance, and Conceptual Coherence in Sport Psychology
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