ABSTRACT

This chapter of the book argues that the large discretionary room researchers have in specifying their entire empirical strategy, the so-called researcher degrees of freedom are the main reason behind false feedback. They create a garden of forking paths (Gelman and Loken 2013), out of which only a specific series of forking paths allows obtaining the true statistical model (i.e., true feedback). The chapter explains why such researcher degrees of freedom arise. It concludes that because the garden of forking paths is so vast, different researchers will naturally choose different researcher degrees of freedom, leading to always different empirical results and thus to large variation in empirical feedback.