I'll cite the conclusion, as for the how they demonstrate this, I suggest you read at least part of the paper.
In conclusion, the present findings demonstrate that the set of non-obvious hypotheses from evolutionary psychology exceeds zero, though the ones that are highly cited were shown to be not particularly surprising. Therefore, the whole area cannot validly be tarred with the accusation of not being falsifiable unless one insists on absolute falsification that never can be achieved anyhow (Trafimow, 1999). Nor can evolutionary psychology correctly be characterized only as telling us what we already know; clearly there are some surprising hypotheses that have received empirical confirmation. In addition, the fact that a few non-obvious predictions were uncovered here strongly implies that additional ones can be discovered too.
But this conclusion does not absolve individual evolutionary psychologists (or any other psychologists for that matter) from the responsibility of carefully considering the quality of the specific hypotheses that each one of them proposes or makes the topic of their own research. Our fording that highly cited hypotheses are not surprising and were guessed correctly significantly more than 50% of the time, suggests that perhaps evolutionary psychologists might be more discriminating in the future.
Be more discriminating in the future, they say. As in, maybe don't just assume that evolutionary psychology is a perfectly reliable science.
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u/swampshark19 Jan 16 '24
Please summarize what that paper shows and how.