In social sciences, you study one topic and then move on to the next.For example, Yotam and I did this project on social boundaries and political attitudes, designed the study, collected the data, analyzed the data, wrote it up, and ultimately it was published— it took everything Year! I was very happy with the results and moved on. The idea is that someone else picks up the strings. There were many minor concerns, measurement issues, attribution, generalizations, etc., which we discussed in the paper and again hoped that they would be useful to further researchers.
And that's often the case. Sometimes we return to old problems (for example, we wrote a paper on incumbency advantage) in 1990 and was followed up for 18 years. later), and we still have I'm working on it R-hat, it's been over 30 years since I first came up with this idea, and even there we don't usually work with continuous focus.
The opposite approach in science is to relentlessly dig into a single phenomenon and pinpoint it. I think this is what historians do when they immerse themselves in archives for a decade and then emerge to write the definitive book on the subject.
here is an exampleFrom cognitive psychology, not history, by Andrew Meyer and Shane Frederick:
This paper presents 59 new studies (N=72,310) that primarily focus on the „bat and ball problem.“ It documents our attempts to understand the determinants of false intuitions, our exploration of ways to stimulate reflection, and our discovery that false intuitions often survive no matter what reflections are provoked. . Our study helps inform the concept of a dual-process model, as „System 1“ processes often override or corrupt „System 2“ processes. Many people choose to hold on to their intuition even when directly faced with counterintuitive simple arithmetic, especially when their intuition is mostly correct.
This paper contains an attractive ASCII graphic reproduced above (e.g., page 8) here). I love ASCII graphics! Regarding this paper, Frederick writes:
One thing I'm proud of is that I've compiled 59 studies into just 9 pages. The other thing that I love, and I think you probably love too, is that once the sample sizes get big enough (and some are pretty big), psychology starts to look like physics. is.
What really impressed me about this paper was not the sample size, but the tenacity of the project. I mean that in a good way.