I was looking for someone to specify a well supported psychological theory that predicts that CBT should be effective. What’s the theory, and what’s the evidence that people believed it before CBT came along?
I also think Shulman’s example of IQ is different from the physics/chemistry case. It was discovered that scores on a short IQ test predicted long-term job performance on a range of tasks. Organizations that used IQ in hiring were then able to obtain better long-term job performance. But IQ was not something that was predicted from a model of how the brain or mind works. Even now, a century after the development of IQ tests, I’m not sure we have a good bottom up account of why a few little reasoning questions can be as informative about human cognitive performance as IQ seems to be. (Not saying that IQ gives you all the information you want, but a few short questions provide a surprising amount of information).
Re: your examples successful spin-offs for psychology, to what extent did these therapies come out of well-established theory? Maybe someone can weigh in here. It seems possible that these are good therapies but ones that don’t have a strong basis in theory (in contrast to technologies from physics or chemistry).