Thought experiments: No argument here—We need more of them

Abstract

SummaryThought experiments are defined by Aguinis et al. as “judgments about what would happen if an imagined scenario were real.” They demonstrated through a multidisciplinary literature review that thought experiments have been used productively to generate and test theory in a wide variety of fields, including psychology, economics, medicine, sociology, marketing, and finance. Despite their utility, they concluded that thought experiments are vastly underutilized within the field of organizational behavior (OB). They go on to present a taxonomy of four basic types based on a theory's stage of development (early vs. late) and a study's theoretical objective (confirmation vs. disconfirmation). To help OB scholars effectively apply thought experiments, they provided a decision‐tree for evaluating the potential utility of a thought experiment and which of the four types would be most appropriate. Next, they advanced a set of best‐practice recommendations and showed how they could be applied within the domain of workplace allyship. Rather than contesting these points in this “counterpoint” article, I seek to reinforce them, as I have no argument against the notion that thought experiments are powerful methodological tools for advancing and testing theory that are underutilized by OB scholars. Nonetheless, I contend that given their definition of thought experiments, more OB works have employed them than surfaced from their review, and I provide three examples that their search terms missed. Finally, to bolster their overarching points, I explore how the theory generated in these three conceptual articles could have been strengthened through more extensive applications of their best‐practice recommendations.