Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
Reporting an exploratory subgroup finding as the primary confirmatory hypothesis.
- Is an instance
Re-framing a discovery study as a confirmatory study after the fact.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A genuinely pre-registered hypothesis test.
- Not an instance
An explicitly labelled exploratory analysis.
Editorial commentary
Kerr (1998) introduced HARKing as a methodological diagnosis. It is structurally distinct from p-hacking: HARKing changes the stated hypothesis to match the result, whereas p-hacking changes the analysis to obtain a result. Pre-registration and registered reports are the principal defences against HARKing.
References
- Kerr, 'HARKing: Hypothesizing after the results are known' (Personality and Social Psychology Review, 1998); Rubin, 'The costs of HARKing' (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 2022).
Also known as
HARKing
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
xml
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="HARKing (Hypothesising After Results are Known)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/harking-hypothesising-after-results-are-known" />json
{
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"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"name": "HARKing (Hypothesising After Results are Known)",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/harking-hypothesising-after-results-are-known",
"description": "Presenting a post-hoc hypothesis, formulated after data analysis, as if it had been the a priori hypothesis under test.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/reproducibility-and-computational-research/",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/harking-hypothesising-after-results-are-known",
"sameAs": [
"HARKing"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}
