So whether you are a scientist yourself or you're a graduate student or an undergrad who's interested in science or just the layperson interested in science

You really want to be listening to this because

It's really important to not only learn how to think like a scientist and how to apply the scientific method, but it's really important to learn how to conduct interesting research.

And this is not something that is often taught, let's say when you're pursuing your PhD. You're taught methodological rigor, you're taught

how to conduct a literature review, you're taught, you know, how to apply the scientific method, propose a research

questions, posit some hypotheses, develop the data collection procedure to test the

hypotheses, collect the data, analyze the data, you know,

through some data analytic procedures, some statistical inferencing, and then arrive at a conclusion,

offer some practical theoretical implications, some future research streams,

and then voila, you've written a paper or you've written your doctoral dissertation. And's all great of course we want to

teach people how to do good science but how do you teach people how to do

interesting science now this is something that I've been

railing against for much of my career because I very quickly learned that most academic research is

astoundingly boring. Astoundingly boring.

Astoundingly boring, not because there aren't many, many interesting things to study, but it's because people end up being focused on the wrong things.

So they sacrifice interestingness for rigor.

But of course, these are not mutually exclusive metrics, right? You could be very rigorous, both in terms of the internal and external validity of your research, while also being interesting.

And I don't mean to, by the way, imply that interesting means that it has to be something that is covered

on the six o'clock news that it has to be sexy and and therefore somehow you know flippant research not at all you can say some

unbelievably powerful things about the human condition if we're now we're talking about research in the human context that are you go wow this is interesting I mean that's that's one of the reasons I love the behavioral sciences right why I love consumer psychology and evolutionary psychology.

There are so many fascinating things that we can study,

but people end up being stuck in designing very rigorous experiments or developing mathematical models that are really

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