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Let the data talk: embrace exploratory research

Open-ended research is essential to building solid hypotheses in the social sciences — without it, even the best-planned analyses can fail.
By
  1. Balazs Aczel

    1. Balazs Aczel is a professor of psychology at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.

Attending a psychology conference this month, I was struck by an unsettling trend in social-science research. The abstract book revealed that nearly all of the 1,500 posters and talks related to some kind of confirmatory work — using statistical analyses to test an existing hypothesis. Hardly any reported the sort of open-ended exploratory research needed to come up with those hypotheses.

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Nature 635, 788 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03826-z

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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