ABSTRACT
Critics of our research methods like to tell the story of the blind men and the elephant: Different men examine different parts of an elephant, and each is sure that the whole elephant is a trunk, a leg, a side, a tail, or an ear. This story is popular because it illustrates a common fallacy in research. In all too many cases, researchers generalize from one atypical segment to the whole beast. On the academic side, this fallacy is evident in generalizations from college students to all consumers, from one advertisement to all advertising, and from one laboratory experiment to the whole world. On the practitioner side, this fallacy is evident in generalizations from isolated test markets to nationwide new-product introductions, from people-meter readings to television-commercial audiences, and from attitude-change scores to final sales.
