A Recipe for Honest Consumer Research

Abstract

In the past decade, consumer psychology has experienced a crisis of confidence. Research in our field has rightfully been criticized for p-hacking, Hypothesizing After the Results are Known, and other practices that lead to overestimation of the reliability and replicability of published results. Remediation has centered on more closely approximating the ideal hypothetico-deductive (i.e., confirmatory) method. There has been a push towards forming, and registering, selective hypotheses before running experiments, testing only those hypotheses, and testing each hypothesis with a single, preplanned analysis. We argue that doing better confirmatory experiments is not the (whole) solution and that HARKing and running multiple analyses are not the problem per se. The problem is that we misrepresent exploratory research as confirmatory. Forcing exploratory research into a hypothetico-deductive straitjacket leads to bad hypothesis testing. The straitjacket also leads to bad exploration, crowding out essential, good exploration that deserves space in our journals. We propose a recipe for more honest consumer research, in which authors report exploratory studies meant to generate hypotheses followed by truly confirmatory studies that test those hypotheses.

Keywords: preregistration, p-hacking, HARKing, exploratory research, consumer research, consumer psychology

JEL Classification: M3, B4