Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In psychology, we tend to follow the general logic of fal-sificationism: we separate the ‘context of discovery’ (howwe come up with theories) from the ‘context of justification’(how we test them). However, when studying human interac-tion, separating these contexts can lead to theories with lowecological validity that do not generalize well to life outsidethe lab. We propose borrowing research practices from for-mal inductive methodologies during the process of discover-ing new regularities and analyzing natural data without beingled by theory. From the perspective of experimental psychol-ogy, this approach may appear similar to the ‘questionable re-search practice’ of HARKing (Hypothesizing After The Re-sults are Known). We argue that a carefully constructed formof HARKing can be used systematically and transparently dur-ing exploratory research and can lead to more robust and eco-logically valid theories.