How Do You Formulate a Testable Exciting Hypothesis?

Abstract

The first reaction of many reviewers to a research proposal or a journal article is either excitement or boredom. If the proposal is boring, they are unlikely to vote a high rating. In almost any science, a necessary but not sufficient condition for something to be important – which in this context means being fundable, being reportable in good scientific journals, and perhaps having an impact on the field – is that it is exciting. When you talk to your friends about your research idea, your proposal should elicit excitement; if it does not, you should think more about your ideas. This chapter suggests that when someone expounds a belief or a theory, excitement is created by the credible possibility that it is not true. The greatest compliment to the person proposing the idea is to say, “I do not believe it!” This chapter shows that a way to generate excitement is to compare two or more reasonable hypotheses and propose research to show that one of them predicts data better than the other(s). It will help you to craft a proposal that says, “I believe that these relationships hold and I am going to test them in such a way that I predict something that others do not predict.”