Heuristics and Comparison Standards: Developing Hypotheses Via Thought Experiments

Abstract

Organizational research seeks to advance theory through the testing of hypotheses derived from theory. While the task of hypothesis development is widely acknowledged to require imaginative and disciplined thinking, unfortunately, the practice of hypothesis development remains ambiguous and defies efforts to distill it into a replicable process or even into a set of best practices. The present paper is oriented to novices and seeks to provide three strategies that may be used in order to spur the development of well thought out and precise hypotheses. First, we demonstrate that comparisons are at the heart of all knowledge acquisition within organizational research and subsequently incorporate comparison standards into the hypothesis development process. By deliberately invoking comparison standards as a tool for theoretical thinking, researchers may expand and clarify their thinking and increase the precision of their hypotheses. Second, we demonstrate how three less commonly discussed tricks or heuristics for hypothesis development may stimulate thinking to result in stronger hypotheses. Lastly, we show how thought experiments, “hypothetical cases intended to function as experiments” (Häggqvist, 2009, p. 57), for generating hypotheses may be enhanced by combining comparison standards and our three heuristics. By offering practical guidelines for hypothesis development we hope to provide junior scholars with tools that may be used to fully articulate their hypotheses.