> What are these results actually telling us that the average person doesn’t already know?
Nothing. It's a trivial claim, but does this imply we should not research it?
An enormous amount of effort in the hard sciences is dedicated to proving/stating:
* Claims that on their face appear trivial - like 1+1=2, or the "two points determine a line" postulate
* Things that seem obvious and hardly worth stating - like the pigeonhole principle, or laws of associativity/commutativity/distributivity
* Seemingly redundant re-phrasings of the thesis (every theorem, once it clicks)
But these sorts of mathematical rules become increasingly non-obvious when combined with each other. There is a reason the hard sciences works like this: you want to arrange knowledge hierarchically. You need to have a foundation of knowledge in order to do anything more complex.
The social sciences don't work like this, but they should. Whenever someone proves obvious things, they get told, "why are you wasting time proving that? Everyone already knows that." But psychology, with its replication crises, has a long way to go before it becomes like a hard science. You need to accumulate a hierarchy of proven foundations.