Why do psychologists often not use mathematical models to express their theories? I come from an economics background where people often written explicit mathematical models for their theories. To be clear, the vast majority of economic models are not useful quantitatively — the functional forms, etc, tend to be way off. However, the models are useful in disciplining the qualitative predictions from the theory. Human intuition is faulty. If we just rely on intuition in building theories, we almost always miss something until we write them out using models.
When I read psychological theories, I find that most of them are not expressed in explicit models. This makes me worried that my understanding of the theories can be incomplete and different from what the original authors intended.
Why is this the common practice? Would we gain anything to make psychological theories mathematically explicit, or will that be a waste of time?
Come read some cognition! It's a wide open field with angles on all kinds of psychology stuff, and we're having a great time throwing greek letters around like confetti. I think you might like it!
One of my favorite recent pro-model rants is this one psyarxiv.com/rybh9/ Although, to be fair they do argue for 'computational' rather than 'mathematical'. I would argue these both mean 'explicit formalism', which is what you're after here?
There's a whole journal of mathematical psychology
www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-mathematical-psychology
or Computational Brain and Behavior www.springer.com/journal/42113
is full of cool stuff on a surprisingly wide range of psych topics united by a common theme of awesome mathy-ness
Psych is very broad, but whatever corner of it you're interested in, there's almost certainly a math-y cognitive/computational version of it (as well). Those mathpsych folks definitely get around. Probably the most math-resistant corner of psych is social psych, emergent behavior of groups type stuff is absolutely vicious to model, as you would know, coming from econ... but see eg. cogsci.mindmodeling.org/2019/papers/0172/0172.pdf
Explicit formalism is the future of psych, and quite a lot of the future is here already