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Science–service integration is a key tenet of clinical psychology. However, precisely whom clinical psychology research serves, and how successfully, often goes unexamined. Without defining and systematically prioritizing service-centred research, clinical psychology will fall short of the profession’s goal: to understand and reduce mental illness in individuals and communities.
Applied behavioural science tends to overvalue interventions that can be readily tested using experiments. This experimental validation bias drives the popularity of light interventions and nudges and unnecessarily limits the scope and ambition of the field.
