How Do I Reason? (2 of 5)
Speaker: Mikko Ketokivi (IE Business School)
Bounded rationality, overconfidence, attentional bias, confirmation bias, selection bias, et cetera. The list of factors severely limiting decision-makers' rationality is endless. Surprisingly, few scholars consider this basic fact when they examine their own reasoning faculties. Yet, just like managers, researchers are decision-makers. In this session, we look at scholarly reasoning and argument from the point of view of research practice. We also examine the role of prescriptive and normative methodology in the process: How can methodological training help scholars improve their reasoning? Or is this a question of training, methodological or otherwise, in the first place?
Recommended reading:
- Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-220.
- Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121-1134.
- Lipton, P. (2004). Inference to the Best Explanation. London: Routledge.
- Lave, C. A., and J. G. March (1975). An Introduction to Models in the Social Sciences. New York: Harper & Row.
- Ketokivi, M., and S. Mantere. (2010). Two strategies for inductive reasoning in organizational research. Academy of Management Review 35(2), 315-333.
- Mantere, S., & Ketokivi, M. (2013). Reasoning in organization science. Academy of Management Review, 38(1), 70-89.
- Ketokivi, M., Mantere, S., & Cornelissen, J. P. (2017). Reasoning by analogy and the progress of theory. Academy of Management Review, 42(4), 637-658.
"Food for thoughts", indeed. Before viewing this session, I did confound the ways of reasoning and the ways of doing research (research design). It made me contemplate what we claim deductive or inductive research design and the 'extreme state' of generalising and contextualising. Is that extreme generalisation actually a high level of contextualisation in one way or another? Now I can find the answer thanks to your transparent explanation. :) Thank you Prof. Ketokivi, and I really look forward to your subsequent sessions.
Thank you, and I hope to see you again next Friday! In the follow-up reflection on this session (which was just posted), I make the point that not acknowledging the use of abductive reasoning and thinking it's induction, we end up "overplaying our reasoning hand" in that we mistakenly believe our reasoning to be stronger than it actually is. This leads to confirmation bias. If we are going to be biased, we should try to be biased toward being conservative in our reasoning.
@@MikkoKetokivi Totally agree!
Thanks for sharing. I was not able to join for this session. I had a class.
This is exactly why the lectures are recorded. I understand the timing of the live sessions may be problematic.
Let me make a clarification on the claim I present at 4:42. Instead of "deduction, induction, and abduction are forms of reasoning, not ways of doing research," a better formulation would have been, "deduction, induction, and abduction are forms of reasoning, not research designs." Saying "I do deductive research" is misleading, because what we casually call "deductive research" incorporates inductive and abductive reasoning as well. The same observation applies to "inductive research" and "abductive research."