How questionable are predatory social science journals?

Since 2011 there has been a huge increase in the number of new scientific journals. Many of them have been accused of engaging in deceptive or "predatory" practices, and it has been claimed that most of them publish articles of poor quality. We compared 25 articles relevant to psychology taken from these "predatory" journals with 25 psychology-related articles taken from "non-predatory" journals considered to be of good (but not great) quality. We removed the author and journal identification from each article and had qualified psychologists conduct blind reviews for quality on five criteria. Raters found highly significant differences with medium-large to very large effect sizes favoring the non-predatory journals on all five criteria. We also asked authors who had been published in both predatory and non-predatory journals to rate the quality of their experiences with reviewers and editors of these journals on seven criteria. Author differences in satisfaction were not significantly different on six of the criteria, but editors and reviewers for the non-predatory journals were rated significantly higher. Discussion focused on how non-predatory journals might improve their services to authors without sacrificing quality, and the pros and cons of authors' choices to submit manuscripts to predatory journals.