Black boxes are mechanisms, systems, or tools that we use without knowledge or interest in how they work internally; instead we look only at the input and output, or stimulus and response. Psychology, in its drive to establish itself as a hard science, appears to accept the closing of its black boxes with too great a readiness. What I suggest here is simply that we would benefit from a more scrupulous assessment of the validity and pragmatism of the black boxes we create, endorse and use within our field.
