The winter of our discontent made glorious summer: Psychology's accelerating pace of scientific discovery

In the quarter century since Wachtel (1980) published his influential jeremiad on psychology's slow pace of scientific progress, the field has done very little to incorporate his prescriptive recommendations. Nevertheless, recent decades have witnessed a remarkable – largely unanticipated – acceleration in rate of scientific discovery across numerous domains of psychological inquiry. This felicitous development mirrors in many respects the laudable fecundity that has long characterized the natural sciences, and we believe it is attributable primarily to the inexorable trend of consilient integration between psychology and related natural science disciplines such as neurobiology, genetics, behavioral ecology, and cognitive neuroscience.