jcp-theory-development

npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill jcp-theory-development --agent claude-code

Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.

# Theory Development (jcp-theory-development) ## When to trigger - You have a consumer effect but no explanatory **psychological process** - Hypotheses read as "A increases B" with no account of *why* it happens in the mind - A reviewer wrote "the theory is thin" or "this is an effect in search of a process" - Your moderators feel like a robustness dump rather than tests of the mechanism - You cannot name, in one clause, the mediator that produces the effect ## At JCP the mechanism IS the contribution JCP does not reward effects; it rewards **explanations of effects**. The theory section must specify a **psychological process** — a shift in inference, construal, attention, affect, motivation, goal activation, identity, or processing fluency — that *generates* the consumer outcome, and then derive hypotheses that test that process a priori. The standard frame is a causal chain: **antecedent → psychological process (mediator) → consumer outcome**, with **moderators** that the process predicts. A paper whose contribution is "X affects Y" will be desk-rejected or sent back; a paper whose contribution is "X affects Y *because* it changes mental state M, and only when condition C holds"