Why most research based on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test is unsubstantiated and uninterpretable: a response to Murphy and Hall (2024)

Murphy and Hall (2024) present two criticisms of our review of construct validity evidence reporting practices for the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET; Higgins, Kaplan, Deschrijver, & Ross, 2024). Namely, they argue that we conflated poor reporting practices with poor validity and that our conclusions about the validity of RMET scores relied too heavily on structural validity evidence at the cost of external validity evidence. Moreover, they argue that the existing external and structural validity evidence indicates that RMET scores are generally valid for assessing emotion recognition ability. In this response, we clarify that our conclusion that RMET scores are unsubstantiated as measurements of social cognitive ability was based on evidence that spans the structural, external, and substantive components of validity. Furthermore, reiterating and expanding on the validity evidence in our review, we argue that, based on existing validity evidence, RMET scores are unlikely to be valid measurements of social cognitive ability. Therefore, we stand by our recommendation that researchers stop using the RMET as a measure of social cognitive ability and re-evaluate research findings that rely on RMET scores as measurements of social cognitive ability.