Asking nature the right questions

Scientific research involves asking and trying to answer questions about nature. Progress largely depends on asking the right questions, either initially or eventually. Psychology researchers will greatly benefit by taking greater care with the questions that they ask. In some subfields, the questions asked are vague, are the wrong ones, or are essentially unanswerable. Researchers sometimes persist with a question that other research and theorizing have shown to be the wrong one. This happens because researchers im implicitly assume that they always need to discover the one way in which things occur; for example, the one way in which all participants in an experiment will always perform a given task in all circumstances, information that is sometimes useful initially but that usually is false. Another mistake researchers make is trying to answer a heuristic question only. In this article, the nature of scientific questions in general and how they get answered are examined, and some guidelines for question framing and answering in psychology are offered.