Legal HARKing: theoretical grounding in interaction research

In psychology, we tend to follow the general logic of falsificationism: we separate the ‘context of discovery’ (how we come up with theories) from the ‘context of justification’ (how we test them). However, when studying human interaction, separating these contexts can lead to theories with low ecological validity that do not generalize well to life outside the lab. We propose borrowing research practices from formal inductive methodologies during the process of discovering new regularities and analyzing natural data without being led by theory. From the perspective of experimental psychology, this approach may appear similar to the ‘questionable research practice’ of HARKing (Hypothesizing After The Results are Known). We argue that a carefully constructed form of HARKing can be used systematically and transparently during exploratory research and can lead to more robust and ecologically valid theories.