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jcp-theory-development
Use when building the psychological theory and hypotheses for a Journal of Consumer Psychology (JCP) manuscript — naming the mechanism (mediator), deriving theory-predicted moderators, and ruling out rival processes. Builds the mechanism that IS the contribution; it does not run the studies (jcp-methods).
Journal-of-Consumer-Psychology-Skills/skills/jcp-theory-development/SKILL.md
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# 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" is a JCP paper.
