HARKing: Hypothesizing After the Results Are Known.

Kerr, N. L. (1998). HARKing: Hypothesizing After the Results Are Known. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2(3), 196-217.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1998

DOI

10.1207/s15327957pspr0203_4

Link

https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0203_4

Cited from

philosophy

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Informal Fallacy
  • In science and its philosophy, the ad-hoc rescue (the no-true-Scotsman move applied to a theory's auxiliary definitions) and the appeal to ignorance recur as named failures of scientific argument, and the modern methodological literature names HARKing (hypothesizing after the results are known) and the narrative around p-hacking as post-hoc rationalizations

    This sourceNames HARKing — presenting a post-hoc hypothesis as if predicted — a presumption/acceptability defect whose 'this was a prediction' premise is unwarranted independently of the result it was fitted to.

Mechanisms

• Preregistration Refutation Table
  • By committing the meaning of each outcome across a real set of alternatives before the data exist, it directly blocks HARKing — hypothesizing after the results are known — and the softer garden-of-forking-paths problem where an analyst wanders the outcome space to the story they like.

Verification

This reference passed the adversarial substantiation pipeline: it was checked to exist and to support the claim it is attached to. See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:8e43e2333ba8 · see in the full table